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Demonising the Dingo Yet Again.

By Jennifer Parkhurst

On the 40^th anniversary of Azaria Chamberlain’s death, and being agnostic about it for all these years, I can’t help but ask myself: Did Lindy do it or was it a dingo?

And also: Is there a third option?

Demonising the Fraser Island Dingo

Looking at a random sample of incident reports obtained through RTI pertaining to alleged dangerous dingo attacks -

98 dangerous dingo attacks since 2001 roughly equates to 10 per year.

If 500,000 people visit the island every year and 10 are allegedly attacked then 0.002% of visitors have a negative experience. Out of those, only a few are hospitalized. Compare this with dog attacks which equate to 100,000 per year and put 14,000 people a year in hospital and the dingo looks fairly benign.