'Out of control': community divided over dingo decision

A plan to balance dingo conservation with livestock predation has left Victorians divided and discontented on all sides of a figurative exclusion fence. The Victorian government on Tuesday extended an “unprotection order” for dingoes in eastern Victoria until 2028, allowing the shooting, trapping and baiting of the animals on private property and within 3km of public land. The program was also expanded to include the management of other pest species, along with funding for non-lethal control measures in northwest Victoria where the unprotection order was abolished in May. The May decision sparked backlash ahead of the order’s October expiry, as well as fierce public debate over dingo genetics, its cultural significance, population numbers, non-lethal control alternatives and the apex predator’s role in suppressing feral pests. Dingo populations in the northwest are critically low and inbred, with an estimated population of between 40 and 230, compared to between 2640 and 8800 in eastern Victoria. Pressure from action groups resulted in a series of regional drop-in sessions hosted by Agriculture Victoria in the weeks before the final decision. “We took it to them at these meetings that they didn’t want to have,” Newry cattle farmer Barry Tayler told AAP. “Everyone really stuck it up them, and they got worried about that.” Mr Tayler, who spearheaded the Gippsland Wild Dog Advisory Group’s campaign, said the three-year unprotection renewal in eastern Victoria was a small win in a losing battle. “It’s just a BandAid (solution) to shut us all up until 2028,” he said. “The problem we’ve got is totally out of control.” Dingo numbers had spiked on the back of aerial deer culls that left carcasses behind, and reduced controls during COVID-19 had also supported numbers, Mr Tayler said. “I’ve just never seen this many dingoes,” he said. Farmers believe the expansion of controls to include other feral animals could reduce trappers’ capacity to suppress dingo numbers. “How are they going to supply these trappers to all these areas, to capture all these animals, like your deer and your pigs and your foxes?,” Mr Tayler said. “In the last 20 years, we’ve been fighting tooth and nail (for more trappers) and we still haven’t got them.” University of NSW conservation geneticist Kylie Cairns - whose landmark 2023 genetics study revealed an overwhelming majority of pure dingoes among wild populations - said a better balance needed to be struck. “We need to make sure the impacts of dingoes on livestock are being managed, but that there are places where dingoes can be dingoes, and that’s basically national parks,” Dr Cairns told AAP. “Dingoes are listed as a threatened species, and yet there’s lethal control being carried out inside of national parks and conservation areas.” She said conservation groups were promised government consultation but had been shut out of the process. “It would make much more sense for consultation that brings everyone together,” Dr Cairns said. “That’s how better decisions get made.” Traditional owner groups such as the Taungurung Land and Waters Council also felt their concerns went unheard, the organisation’s biocultural landscapes executive manager Matt Shanks said. “The extended unprotection order disregards Taungurung lore and our obligations as Taungurung people to care for Country, for the benefit of all people,” Mr Shanks said in a statement. “Yirrangan (dingo) are important to maintain balance on Country through their role as an apex predator and cultural entity, providing overall management of other plant and animal species across landscapes.” The dingo’s status seems to weave and stalk between native animal, wild dog, pest or threatened species across Australian jurisdictions. Considered threatened in Victoria and protected in the NT, dingoes are listed in most other states alongside dingo-dog hybrids and feral dogs as a pest with varying levels of protection or control, Deakin University wildlife ecology professor Euan Ritchie told AAP. “In South Australia, below the barrier fence, the legislation treats them all as wild dogs and the goal there is actually to eradicate, not just to control dingoes,” said Prof Ritchie, who is also a councillor on the Biodiversity Council. “It’s hard to think of an animal that invokes more different sets of emotions than the dingo does in Australia.” Multiple nominations to list dingoes as threatened under the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act have failed or been delayed. A Victorian environment department spokesman stood by the unprotection order renewal and the consultation process in the lead-up to the decision. “We are striking the right balance between protecting our vulnerable dingo populations while giving farmers the ability to protect their livestock,” the spokesman wrote. Prof Ritchie disagreed. “You can’t say that there’s a balance when you haven’t compromised at all,” he said. Maintaining a 3km buffer zone around public land boundaries was a key point of contention. “Dingoes don’t just hang out and stop at the buffer zone, they can move five, 10 or 15 kilometres making much larger areas of public land effectively baited with 1080 (poison),” he said. In three years’ time, when the order next comes up for review, Prof Ritchie hoped for a more robust, inclusive consultation process. “I’d like to see far greater effort in terms of consultation and investment in solving this issue and bringing people together,” he said. “At the moment, it still feels like just a whole collection of fractured groups and communities, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”