Add new comment

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.

How is an attack classified? Lunging? Circling, or merely juvenile play behavior?

we find that a large percentage of ‘incidents’ (22%) were instigated by rangers and 40% were predominantly cases of dingo ‘sightings’ written up as ‘loitering’.  The response in 30% of circumstances was to haze the dingo, or in other cases the dingoes had already undergone intense hazing programs. (Hazing is shooting a clay marble from from a sling shot or pellets are fired from a 22 rifle.)

If a dingo attacked and killed Azaria then it is sad but there is no reason to demonize all dingoes because of it. 

Only 4% of the incidents reports we have analyzed to date show biting, or attempted biting and this includes nipping (where the ‘victim’ describes the nip as a pinch and there was no puncture wound, attempting to bite, but where no bite actually occurred.)

It is also interesting to examine what people were doing prior to an attack, ie giving food to dingoes to lure them for a photo and then chasing them with sticks when they were sick of them.

In none of the 70 reports analysed so far no photos of injuries are included

The serious attack by a dingo on a child in 2007 has questionable circumstances and an affidavit from a barge skipper who did not witness the incident but spoke to the people involved describes his warning to them to stay close to their children and also describes the fact that the parents and the child did not seem overly distressed after the incident. The parents also admitted that they ‘took their eyes of the child for a moment’ but according to the reports the child was at least 200 metres away from the parents at the time of the attack. likewise the CG incident the children were two kilometres away from their parents.

Hunger denominator. The other similarity to the two cases is that just weeks before both the Chamberlain incident and the Gage incident feeding of dingoes was stopped. Chamberlain himself said with regards to the Gage case that ‘to feed dingoes is a pretty unwise thing, its even more unwise to stop feeding them’.

This incident and the Clinton gage incident do not justify demonizing the dingo as an aggressive animal that will always seek to attack people.

In 1974 DERM’s expecrt Laurie Corbett was quoted in Lionel Hudson’s ‘dingoes don’t bark’ as saying there had been no unprovoked attack on a person by a dingo.

Are these governmets trying to hide the fact that they contributed to the deaths with their policies? We should not be blaming the character of the dingo, rather blaming hunger and human interference. Despite the hunger and interference dingoes are not madly racing out and attacking people and in fact when they are being trapped for destruction accept their fates passively without putting up any fight. It is pitifully sad considering what lovely character the dingoes really have.

The food source was removed in 1994 and DERM/QPWS was warned that they would be left with hungry dingoes.