(lively synth music)
- 'Wild dogs' is a generic term
for any Canis species in Australia.
So that includes things like pure dingos, domestic dogs,
and feral domestic dogs, and hybrids between the two.
Dingos arrived in Australia a few thousand years ago,
probably about 5,000 thousand years ago.
'bout 200 years ago, Europeans bring domestic dogs
with them, which are dingos' cousins,
and, after being reunited after 5,000 thousands years,
they joined forces again and hybridised readily.
Now that dingos and wild dogs
and domestic dogs are back together again,
there's probably more wild dogs now
than at any other time in Australia's ecological history.
Dog's have been able to do that because of the changes
brought about since European occupation,
like, increased water resources and food resources.
So, there's no shortage of wild dogs in Australia.
Wild dogs currently occupy about 85% of Australia.
They're naturally increasing
in the remaining 15% of Australia.
The proportion of pure dingos is decreasing in that
and proportion of hybrid wild dogs is increasing
in those spaces.
Because wild dogs occupy almost all of the continent,
they live in a wide variety of habitats.
From central Australian deserts where they hardly get water,
right through to the top of the alpine areas
where they're under two feet of snow through the winter.
So, it's not unusual for wild dogs to be the pure,
sandy-looking animal with white socks,
or just jet-black, or white, or patchy, or striped.
In general, wild dogs'll eat
whatever's available to them where they live.
In arid, central parts of the country it'll be rabbits,
and kangaroos, and mice, and rats.
Up and down the east-coast of Australia,
bandicoots and little wallabies are they're number-one,
preferred prey source.
Wild dog movements typically range from five
or 10 kilometres a day through to about 25 kilometres a day.
Most often those movements are round and round
their home range or their territory,
but if they straighten up and they wanna go
in a particular direction,
wild dogs have been known to move 500 kilometres
in a month or 1300 kilometres in four months.
When we're dealing with that sort of movement
across the landscape, it's very difficult
to manage wild dogs or consider them
to be tied to one particular patch.
Wild dogs form packs, usually.
They don't need to be in packs,
but they often form social groups and packs.
They have a dominant male and a dominant female
but they're very promiscuous.
So, what happens, in practise,
is that most bitches will breed and have pups every year
if they're sexually mature,
but not all of those litters survive.
So, usually one or two litters out of a particular group
will survive and go on to the next year.
Wild dog breeding rate is, what we'd call, pretty high.
Never the less, there's about 2/3 of wild dogs that'll die
before their first or second birthday.
That's a pretty high turnover.
Wild dogs typically breed once a year.
The environmental constraints
that are operating on wild dogs living out in the bush,
typically, force them into annual breeding cycles
and those breeding cycles have a very predictable
annual peak and trough.
In March, April, they're finding boyfriends and girlfriends,
getting together, they're back in a hotel room come June.
Come July, pups are out on the ground
and parents are busily resourcing those pups
and trying to feed them 'till they leave home
at, sort of, October, November-time
and, over the summer, they disperse
and find other places to live.
That annual cycle is found all across Australia.
When wild dogs breed and have a litter of pups,
litter sizes very between,
sort of, two or three up to about 11.
Most of the time,
they're sort of in the four, five, or six mark.
If you can imagine, if you're a wild dog living
out in the bush, it can be very difficult
to raise a family of 10 or 11.
So, litter sizes usually average
around that four, five mark.
- Wild dogs are a pervasive predator.
They will kill and injure livestock, such as sheep,
cattle, calves, other various livestock.
Domestic pets are a big one.
Wild dogs will often injure or kill domestic dogs.
And, obviously, these things can cause an economic cost
to producers and to owners
but, also, it's very upsetting and very stressful
to see your stock or your pet injured.
So, there's some big costs there
and, in some circumstances,
they will approach or attack people.
This is quite rare,
but this can be quite upsetting, of course,
and can actually stop people using certain areas
of the landscape due to fear of being attacked
especially to their children.
Wild dogs can carry a range of disease and pathogens
that can be transferred to people
or to wildlife or livestock.
A common one is echinococcus, which is the hydatid tapeworm.
This area search has shown that 50% of dogs
in southern Queensland actually carry echinococcus.
That can be transferred to livestock or to people
and it can have serious health implications
on organ failure and even resulting in death.
Other parasites include toxocara and spirometra
which, again, they can be transferred to livestock
and to people and have some health implications with that.
So, wild dogs, in or out of the environment,
they are carrying these things.
We need to make sure we protect ourselves from exposure
to dogs, as in handling dogs or carcasses of dogs,
and, also, dog faeces, as well.
If you are in areas where there are dogs
and you have to handle dogs, please wash your hands.
Be totally safe in that regard.
Wash them thoroughly.
From an ecological point of view,
wild dogs needs to be managed
where they're having an impact on our native species.
Wild dogs are a major predator and the extra trepidation
caused by wild dogs on our native species
can be enough to basically push them over the edge.
- Wild dogs and dingos are
probably one of most-studied wildlife species
in Australia and have been for a number of years.
Pretty much because
of their well-known impacts on livestock.
Although much of the research has occurred
in rural areas or agricultural areas
where these impacts are a real big problem,
recently there's been a fair bit of interest
in the occurrence of wild dogs and their impacts
in areas around human habitation,
particularly up the east coast of Australia.
Everywhere from Cairns to Melbourne has wild dogs
in their outer suburbs and even some of the inner suburbs.
If there's a patch of bush big enough
to have things like koalas, and possums,
and little macropods, and things like that,
little kangaroos livin' there, then pretty good chance
there's gonna be wild dogs in those areas.
What we've learned and what people've discovered
from studying wild dogs in these places
over the last few years
is that their home-range size, or their territory sizes,
are a little bit smaller, in some cases, a lot smaller
than their rural counterparts.
They don't need to travel as far to get a feed.
So, they can live quite comfortably in a couple of hectares,
or maybe one kilometre by one kilometre,
or that little crack of bush
between the highway and the suburb.
Wild dogs can live and exploit those areas really well.
In all the movement studies we've done
where we've put collars on dogs,
and let them go, and see where they move,
in all cases, wild dogs are living within 500 metres
to a thousand metres of houses at all times.
They're basically living right under our feet.
I think one of the reasons why people don't recognise
that dingos and wild dogs live right nextdoor to them
in the suburbs is because of the variety of colours
that they come in.
We'll often see a wild dog run past
and just assume it's somebody's pet
that has jumped the fence
when, in reality, that's part of a pack of wild dogs
that's been livin' there forever.
So, I find it very interesting
that wild dogs can be quite adaptable to an urban situation
and do quite well in the presence of humans.
(lively synth music)