General News
2 June, 2024
Barry's Corner: Dingoes
One of the reasons there has been so much loss of our animals and birds has been the loss of the top order predators, such as the wedge-tailed eagle, the goanna and the dingo.
These are the species that live on the smaller, more common animals such as rabbits, and marsupials like wallabies, native rats, possums, galahs, rosellas and even magpies.
Dingoes are the focus now since the protection status has been changed recently and this has got under the collar of people who farm around the edge of the Big and Little Deserts and the Sunset Country.
I have always had a view that we were dealing with wild dogs, but it worried me that there were too many characteristics of actual dingoes. Now, with better technology, they have been proven to be dingoes. Whether it is wild or feral dogs or dingo matters not for their choice of food, and in their wanders they come across a paddock of sheep and boy o boy they are so easy to catch.
Keeping them out of the sheep paddocks is the real challenge. The farmers need a rest now and again and cannot be out and about all the time. It is not a recent problem. It has been going on since the first squatters where they would need to yard the sheep every night with the use of shepherds.
These dingoes have been isolated from other known populations for many years, probably since the settlement and dispossession of the indigenous mob. Fragmentation of the connecting vegetation also has made it harder for any species to move regions.
Whenever you walk about the Big Desert it is not hard to be followed by a dingo and serenaded by a few all night with their howling. As far as I know there has never been an attack there on a human, but livestock is another matter. Not many of these farms have problems with roos - and that can be due to having the dingoes around. There is no easy solution but we need to work towards something to help the farmers and the dingo.