[Music plays]
(Narrator) “Still ran dingo, yellow dog dingo, always
hungry, grinning like a rat trap, never getting nearer,
never getting farther, ran after kangaroo, he had to.”
From the Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling’s
description of Australia’s native dog.
[Music plays]
Graziers have claimed for years that the dingo is responsible
for heavy stock losses, especially amongst sheep.
The Australian Meat Research Committee responded by earmarking
funds for a scientific study of the dog.
Yellow dog dingo has always captured more than his fair share of publicity.
Largely because he is controversial and,
certainly in those days, a bit of a mystery.
[Music plays]
A team from the CSIRO’s Division of Wildlife Research
in Canberra was mobilised in 1966 to carry out the study.
At first no-one could even accurately tell the difference
between a purebred dingo and a crossbreed.
It was some of the initial research which
established that the difference lay in the size
of the teeth and certain bones in the skull.
[Music plays]
Across central Australia and the east coast
the dogs were observed, tracked and
examined in their own domain for thousands of hours.
This makeshift sled is smoothing the ground so that paw
prints can be easily seen later. Over the years methods
of tracing their travels were refined.
At first their tracks were followed.
[Music plays]
More recently large numbers were caught in padded
traps and muzzled briefly so that they could
be fitted with collars containing small radio transmitters.
[Music plays]
Radio receivers pick up the signals from the collars and
the dog’s movements can be monitored for 24 hours a day.
At close range the tracker needs to stay downwind.
[Music plays]
Sometimes the trail went cold.
[Music plays]
In a rocky den the collar is located, but minus the wily dingo.
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These youngsters are waiting their chance at a rabbit warren.
Rabbits, rodents, lizards and carrion are the preferred
diet, according to the studies in central Australia.
Meanwhile in the eastern highlands wallabies and wombats
are the choice over sheep and cattle.
But then the dingo will eat the most common food on hand,
even grasshoppers if need be. Doctor Alan Newsome, leader of
the CSIRO team, says the dingoes sometimes may be a positive
helper to landholders by keeping down pests.
In central Australia for instance after a drought the dingoes
delayed rabbit build up by at least six
months when the good times returned.
But it is difficult to generalise, as Doctor Newsome explains.
(Dr Newsome) The question we’d all like answered of course
is whether dingoes are goodies or baddies.
Looking at these lot it’s a bit hard to imagine that
they’re baddies, but I’ve seen one sheep man in
this mountain country driven out by the effects of
one dingo on his flock. On the other hand we’ve all
seen, those of us who have worked on dingoes have seen
dingoes very abundant in parts of inland Australia and
doing no perceptible damage to stock at all. It seems to
depend very much on circumstance, how much native gain there
is, whether it’s a drought, or whether it’s good times.
The difficulty is that there’s no real...
no one answer for dingo management in the scientific sense for
any place in Australia, and no one answer therefore for
all of Australia. Trying to predict whether dingoes are
going to be a nuisance is a bit like predicting lightening
strike, and difficulty is also trying to prevent it.
Management appears to be... will have to be a rather
more flexible affair than we imagined, because there’s
just no simple answer. And management will presumably
have to change from place to place, from time to time.
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