| Sports |
by ROB TAYLOR
Australian farmers wrestle dingo threat
GUDGENBY VALLEY, Australia: Between
grey granite mountains and drought-ravaged farms is a strip called
the “militarised zone”, the frontline of a battle between farmers
and environmentalists over the survival of Australia’s dingo.
“In that zone no dog may live. It gets killed if it gets in that
place,” senior parks ecologist Don Fletcher, says bluntly laying
bare the strategy to protect vulnerable sheep grazing flocks from
Australia’s top predator.
Dingoes are part dog, part wolf, a last remnant of Asia’s ancestor
to modern dogs. Their place in Australian folklore was secured by
a sensational 1980s murder case involving baby Azaria Chamberlain,
whose parents said she was taken by a dingo.
The animals range from here in the foothills of the rugged
southeastern alps to the desert outback, preying on larger animals
like kangaroos. But environmentalists fear dingoes are at risk of
extinction not only from farmers, but from interbreeding with
ordinary dogs introduced by European settlers over 200 years ago,
weakening their 3,500-year-old genetic line.
And while protected inside parks, World Heritage areas and
Aboriginal reserves, dingoes to many graziers are a pest, savaging
flocks already under stress from a 10-year drought.
“They absolutely torture them, they eat them alive, they’ll just
pull them down and just eat the back legs, hamstrings out of them,
they’ll eat the flanks out and tear the guts out and then they’ll
go on to another one,” Harley Hedger, who hunts dingoes and wild
dogs on contract for angry farmers, says.
Burly government trapper Mick Clarke controls dingoes inside the
zone. Conservationists say the strip buffers a mountain park
sanctuary of near genetically-pure dogs, and keeps farmers and
environmentalists from each others throats. It is a charged job to
make all sides happy.
Clarke, who respects his adversary, squats to lay a rubber-jawed
trap before setting a white Cockatoo bird feather to sway in the
breeze and draw in a curious dingo. Around the trap goes a square
of sticks.
“The dingoes don’t like to step on anything round. They step over
the stick and bang, they hit the trap,” Clarke says, drawing on 30
years of experience trapping wild dogs.
“Without seeing them I know where they live, what they like and
even how big they are. The only thing I don’t know before I catch
them is their colour.”
To help, Clarke has Jess, a grizzled dingo adopted as a pup to
help control the impact of dogs on local sheep flocks.
“She’s almost pure. When she goes bananas in the back of the
truck, I know where the wild ones are,” Clarke says.
Every dog or dingo shot by Clarke is photographed, weighed and
sent to researchers who track changes to dingo bloodlines. By the
early 1990s, around a third of all wild dingoes in Australia’s
southeast were crossed with domestic dogs. In 2004 dingoes were
tagged officially as “vulnerable” to extinction.
That has not stopped Victoria state placing a A$50 bounty on the
heads of all wild dogs in a move critics say will speed their
demise. Animal lovers accused the state government of pushing
dingo populations to extinction. The government argues the bounty
will help eliminate feral dogs and foxes from parts of the state
ravaged by bushfires in December and January, helping the recovery
of farmland.
Some farmers support dingo sanctuaries, but others demand they be
shot, trapped or poisoned, inside or outside protected national
park borders.
“You’ve got the ones that will not allow any control on their
property, right through to ones who will call for any measure,
everywhere, anytime,” Fletcher says.
But most problems, rangers say, are caused by rogue dogs or
dingoes who for unknown reasons abandon traditional prey. Those
rogue dogs pose the biggest headache for Clarke, mainly because
dingoes are also highly intelligent.
“They learn your methods and adapt, which means you have to try
new stuff yourself. You set your traps at one end of a property
after a series of attacks and the dog will attack the other end.
But you get them eventually,” he adds. – Reuters
 
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