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Dingoes being 'thrown out with the bathwater' in wild dog control

Updated August 06, 2015 12:52:16

It might seem an unlikely alliance, but farmers and conservationists are being drawn together by a shared desire to better control wild dogs.

One group wants to protect valuable stock, the other wants to save the dingo.

The founder of a national dingo coalition said she believed the goals were not mutually exclusive and would only work if landholders were on board, but not everyone is convinced.

It is estimated wild dogs cost Australia up to $60 million a year in livestock losses and spending of control measures.

The National Wild Dog Action Plan noted the significance of dingoes and upheld their protection in some areas, but it still defined them as wild dogs that needed to be managed through methods like baiting, trapping and shooting.

Dr Julie Funnell, who founded the Australian Dingo Coalition last year, said she wanted graziers to be given more sustainable control options, like allowing dingo packs to stabilise.

Disrupting the pack structure had dire consequences, she said.

"You basically get a whole lot of traumatised teenagers that form gangs and run around and create chaos, and that's often where you get these attacks where you get 20 or 30 sheep bitten in a night but not killed," she said.

Dr Funnell said a stable dingo pack would also defend its territory and keep other animals away, and prevent more dingoes coming in trying to claim the space.

The suggestion was echoed by CSIRO this week in its latest research summary on dingoes in Australia.

Editor Dr Bradley Smith said graziers needed to find different options because culling was not fixing the problem.

"It doesn't matter how many dingoes are killed, it doesn't reduce the number of (predations), so why continue to do the same thing that doesn't work?" he said.

But leaving dog packs alone drew heavy criticism from some parties, like sheep producer David Counsell, who said it simply was not a viable option.

He claimed wild dogs in western Queensland's Barcaldine area, which he said had bred closely with dingoes, killed more than 1,000 of his lambs last year, costing about $50,000 in lost production.

"There's almost no farmer in Australia that want a stabilised dog population on their property, let alone on a neighbouring property," he said.

However, he acknowledged the science behind the idea, and noted how baiting programs caused problems by disrupting the pack hierarchy.

Mr Counsell did agree preserving the dingo's gene pool was important.

He was calling for more fencing projects to separate wild dogs from dingoes, and to keep both away from livestock.

Meanwhile, graziers and local councils continued their push for a share of government funding to build new cluster and linear fences.

Mr Counsell said co-funded projects between government and landholders could save livestock and boost rural economies.

"The loss of shearers in all our little towns is massive, because there's no longer the number of animals to be shorn [and] goats can't be run successfully," he said.

"It's an opportunity for government to co-invest in building these ventures because it provides some infrastructural projects to get people back working in those country towns."

Topics: beef-cattle, government-and-politics, animals, conservation, sheep-production, barcaldine-4725

First posted August 06, 2015 12:38:41

Original author: Eliza Rogers

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