AUSTRALIAN WAR ON DINGO

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27308, 26 March 1954, Page 8

AUSTRALIAN WAR ON DINGO

ANNUAL CAMPAIGN BEGINS VIGILANCE OF LANDS DEPARTMENTS (From Our Oujn Correspondent.) SYDNEY, March 12. Australian State Government departments are preparing for their annual fight against Australia’s most savage, reckless and costly killer, the dingo. In their thousands, dingoes will soon swarm from the desert of the Centre or remote parts of the Northern Territory and Western Queensland in an effort to break through to the pastures where fat sheep graze and make easy feasting and sadistic sport for them. Thanks to the long-range vigilance of the respective lands departments of New South Wales and South Australia, most of the dingoes will be turned back, hungry and frustrated to the dpsert or the wilderness (from which they came. The comparative few who find their way through the 400 miles of dog-proof fencing on the Queensland and South Australia borders, (perhaps broken down by kangaroo or emu hordes or washed away by sudden floods), into the wide sheep plains of New South Wales will be hunted by gun, trap and poison bait. Before they are caught, killed and scalped as evidence for payment of a reward, they will have massacred scores, perhaps hundreds of sheep. Each year 400 dingoes are killed in New South Wales and their scalps paid for at the rate of £2 each. That £2 is the official reward but landowners and graziers pay considerably more for a pack leader. Recently graziers north of Broken Hill in the remote north-West corner of New South Wales paid £25 for the scalp, of one deep-chested tawny killer. ' Big Reward in Queensland

In the far west of Queensland, where > dingoes are out of hand, as much as t £7O has been offered for one scalp. Queensland hopes to build a 3400mile dingo fence in the next three years to cut off the dingoes from the sheep country. The Queensland Government has estimated that dingoes kill 500,000 sheep a year, worth more than £2,000,000 to the wool industry. Dingoes have cut the sheep population of western Queensland from 24,000,000 to 13,000,000 in the last few years. Amateur and professional hunters and the dropping of poisonous baits from planes have accounted for , 45,000 dingoes in 1952-53. Dingoes are believed to have reached ® Australia with aboriginal migrations. Some authorities say they preceded the First Fleet by only a few thousand years. No one knows just where they , came from, but they have been com- . pared in appearance with the pariah 1 dogs of the Middle East. They now infest the whole of Aus- , tralia with the exception of Tasmania. i The Northern Territory is believed to have most. In spite of meagre re- j sources, hunters killed-10,000 there in j 1952. 5 Cross-Breeding . The dingo will breed with the ( domestic dog, the Alsatian and the dingo making a particularly vicious 1 cross. Alsatians which have not been sterilised are forbidden in some New < South Wales pasture protection dis- ’ tricts. 5 The Assistant Commissioner for « Western Lands, Mr H. C. Spencer, knows as much about dingoes as most ( people. “They’re nasty brutes,” he says. “They are extremely intelligent | and sly. They’re rather bigger and 1 faster than a medium-sized dog and • are the colour and have the killer * look of a lion. They hunt more for sport than for food. As .hunters, they are expert and cruel. A family of two adult dingoes and two pups will tear 40 or 50 sheep to pieces in one night just for the heck of it. If they can’t find sheep and if they are hungry, they will outrun rabbits. Fast ones can catch emus. Two or three will catch eveh a Kangaroo. ■ “They rarely attack humans, though I’ve had a big fellow come at me whan we had him cornered. We were chasing him in a jeep across a claypan in the far-west and one of the men fired from the jeep and stunned him with a bullet. When I saw he was hit and still, I got out for a close look, he came at me like a yellow flash, his top lip curled back and fangs showing right back into his head like a shark. He had to run 10 feet to get at me and would have reached me if one of the boys hadn’t clouted him with an axe as he went by.” “Tricky Business” “Shooting dingoes is a tricky, unprofitable business in wooded country. The two professional • hunters or ‘doggers' the commission employs rarely attempt to shoot them. They use decoys to lure them into traps. The dingo is like any other dog in that he has an uncontrollable curiosity. The ’doggers’ use scented lures or bright-coloured toys, such as the little windmills one buys at the show, to lead the" animal into the four-inch square jaws of the trap. We pay the doggers £4 for a scalp. They make a living.” Mr Spencer would not even guess how many dingoes there are in New South Wales. “We’d have to depend on property owners for a census and their properties are so vast they don’t know, what they’ve got. There are very few properties out there under 50,000 acres and a number are over 150,000,” he said.

“We can thank the dingo fence that there are not hordes in this sheep country. With unfenced borders into the Northern Territory and the centre, Queensland has taken our share as well as its own. The Queensland Government originally put up its 217 miles of fence to check rabbits. The South Australian Government built the 140 miles along our western border.”