Dingoes continue to get a bad press from some of the farmers bordering Namadgi Park, with the Canberra Times reporting on 18 May that NSW farmers Peter and Laura Luton were concerned that the ACT Government is considering changing the name ‘wild dogs’ to ‘dingoes’. They fear the result will be less baiting and trapping by the ACT Parks and Conservation Service. Other graziers were mentioned who are happy with current management.
While sympathising with the Lutons’ recent loss of sheep, the National Parks Association of the ACT (NPA) would welcome a review of the entire management system, including use of more accurate labels wherever appropriate. DNA testing of Namadgi’s ‘wild dogs’ has shown these animals are native dingoes. Misleading labels such as ‘wild dog’, ‘feral dog’ and ‘hybrid’ should no longer be found in any credible communication.
The wild dingo population has its harmful impacts but also provides ecological benefits. Science continues to improve our understanding regarding both, yet prevailing thinking is based on ideas from the post-World War era. These should be tested, challenged, and changed where necessary to forge a thoroughly defensible policy for the future. The NPA wrote to the ACT Government a year ago suggesting the need for thorough review.
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Studies of small native animals, such as bush rats, have found the smell of dingo on a tunnel trap deters them from seeking the energy-rich food inside. Paradoxically, they more readily enter traps that smell of cat or fox, species far more likely to eat them. Researchers from Sydney University believe dingoes have been here long enough for fauna to recognise them and adapt to them, but foxes and cats have not. The lack of smell response by the native prey animals may be part of the reason for the ongoing extinctions related to cat and fox predation. Dingoes are not causing extinctions. In fact, dingoes have been credited with helping save species by supressing the activity of cats and foxes. The key point is that native animals are reacting to the dingo as if it is a native species.
Aboriginal people lived, and sometimes hunted, with dingoes where European settlers cleared the most fertile parts of the landscape, brought in sheep, and experienced distressing losses. Dingoes would have found a new, less agile prey had replaced their usual fare of wallabies, wombats, echidnas, kangaroos, possums and koalas in the places where the trees had once stood.
At Gudgenby Station, now in Namadgi, valiant but doomed efforts were made in the 19th century to manage sheep by constant shepherding. Eventually it was decided to run only cattle, and this decision remained unchanged through the 20th century, until Gudgenby became the centre of Namadgi.
Some families in the region continued with sheep, battling it out with the dingoes, using poison, traps, shooting and fences. Around the world, humans have often removed top predators, such as the dingo. The expected benefits have not always been achieved, and only later was it appreciated that these animals had been playing a role in regulating the ecosystem. For example, the problem of overabundant kangaroos is one result of having inadvertently switched off the regulatory effect of dingo predation.
In Namadgi, there is evidence that dingoes supress invasive species such as feral goats and rabbits, and possibly feral pigs, fallow deer and sambar, with likely benefits for soils, stream banks, vegetation, plant diversity, native Galaxia fish and critically endangered Corroboree Frogs. Because we are now officially in the biodiversity crisis, the reasons to reconsider these benefits are magnified.
Namadgi dingoes prefer medium to large prey such as kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and echidnas and overcome even the largest male Eastern Grey Kangaroos, even if the kangaroo retreats to water, as shown here. Photo by Oliver Orgill
Diet studies show Namadgi dingoes eat a wider range of native species, whereas foxes tend to hit a few species harder. Foxes in Namadgi severely limit the abundance of brush-tailed possums and red necked wallabies, but the same is not as apparent for dingoes. If dingoes reduce fox numbers (a topic of current research) they are likely to provide a nett benefit for native prey species.
All of this might suggest that more effort should be applied to fox control in Namadgi and that the best arrangement for dingo populations in national parks is to leave them to determine their own population limits. But there is another side to the dingo story: the need to protect sheep-growing businesses.
Governments have long been willing to sacrifice nature conservation in the protection of agriculture. The first management plan for Namadgi, in 1985, allowed ‘wild dog’ trapping (they were thought to be feral dogs crosses), but no baiting, to within 1 km of the park boundary, with the aim of reducing the movement of dingoes or dogs out of the park. Under self-government, the control program inside the park expanded slowly but relentlessly. Later management plans omitted specific limits on dingo control activity. Although awareness began to dawn in the 2000s that science said these were native dingoes, and that they provided biodiversity and pest management benefits, after three decades of self government, the control program has blown out dramatically.
Taking account of the position of the 24 permanent lines of bait stations in the park, and GPS collar results showing an average dingo home range in Namadgi and Kosciuszko is 100 sq km, there is no longer anywhere in Namadgi where a dingo could have a home range free from the risk of being poisoned.
As well as the permanent baiting, there is a reactive program. If a grazier in the ACT or adjoining NSW reports a dingo attack, a contractor is dispatched to deal with the animal. In most cases a particular individual dingo is responsible. To kill dingoes in the area of the property only fixes the problem after the particular individual has been killed. The problem animal is often living on the property. Whether control actions deep in the national park are effective can be questioned, but there is little doubt that actions on-farm and near-farm are crucial.
Therefore, it is a damning criticism of the current system that few if any landholders adopt any of the recommended on-farm methods to reduce their risk. Of course the off-farm methods such as baiting, trapping and shooting can be replicated, but importantly, some methods can only be used on-farm, such as dingo-proof fencing, use of sheep-guarding animals, and not leaving sheep unsupervised for long periods in paddocks close to forested hillsides. Electrified fladry used to deter wolves would have the lowest cost of the on-farm measures and is the least difficult to set up, yet no one has tried even that.
The NPA believes that all of the on-farm measures should be used before depredations are made against the fundamental core purpose of the national park.
The NPA is heartened to see the investment being made by ACT Government in high quality research on dingoes and other fauna. (We are aware of two PhD projects and contracted research on refinements to control technology.) This is a sound investment because evidence is always key to successful management of controversial wildlife issues.
Regarding evidence, we are aware of claims about the number of dingoes in Namadgi. In the dingo case, where particular individual animals do the sheep killing, on farms outside the park, the population size within the park is not as important as some commentators seem to imagine. More importantly, we need to await completion of the research before statements are made about the population size.
A co-operative approach between landholders works best to control the sheep-killing activity of dingoes. But decades of government timidity and over-reaction to grazier complaints, have made the system one-sided. It is not cooperative, but a one sided subsidy. And one whose activity is mostly hidden from public knowledge, and which lacks verification or meaningful scrutiny. There is now so much government activity against dingoes and such a high impost on biodiversity conservation, that it might be cheaper and better to pay landholders to convert to cattle.
Fears by farmers such as the Lutons about the control implications of a name change from ‘wild dog’ to ‘dingo’ overlook that the name change happened years ago. And that control activity has increased greatly since then. Signs erected at the start of walking trails in Namadgi 15-years ago and still in place, referred to the genetic status of these animals, based on the limited DNA research available at that time, as ‘dingoes’. But we agree with the need to question current arrangements.
The NPA encourages all relevant governments to review dingo management arrangements for which they are responsible in the high country of Australia. The best scientific thinking available should be used to develop plans that will support defensible management for the future.
Rosemary Hollow is president of the National Parks Association of the ACT