It’s a debate that’s raged on “since colonisation” — are they dingoes or wild dogs?
Right across Australia, especially in sheep country, there’s been a coordinated effort to control the dogs that pose a fatal risk to livestock.
For hundreds of years, dingoes and wild dogs have been baited or shot by landholders and local and state governments.
Now, new research looking at the genetic breakdown of 400 dingoes across Australia has confirmed majority of the wild dogs are, in fact, dingoes.
University of New South Wales conservation geneticist Kylie Cairns has been studying dingoes for more than a decade.
She said she grew frustrated by the outdated method of DNA testing, developed in 1999, and decided to conduct her own studies using a newer method.
“We used a method where we can look at 195,000 different DNA sites along the genome,” Dr Cairns said.
“The previous research looked at only 23 DNA sites.
“So it’s a dramatic improvement in terms of the amount of information you’re getting for each animal.”Dr Cairns and her research colleagues performed genetic ancestry tests on samples they collected from 307 wild dingoes, 84 captive dingoes and 152 domestic dogs around Australia.
In NSW, where dingoes aren’t protected, and Queensland, where they are protected in national parks, it was commonly believed most of the population were “wild dogs”.
Dr Cairns’ research found only two of the 171 samples from those states had less than 70 per cent dingo ancestry, and most of the animals sampled in those states were “pure dingoes or historical dingo backcrosses”.
In Victoria, where dingoes are only protected in national parks, the DNA analysis found up to 88 per cent of samples from that state came from pure dingoes.
Dr Cairns said it had previously been thought there were no pure dingoes remaining in Victoria.
Dingoes part of country
Jirrbal woman Sonya Takau, the founder of dingo advocacy platform Dingo Culture, said the dingo was not only a cultural keystone species, but kin to Indigenous cultures across Australia.
She grew up surrounded by dingo pups, and remembers being told the dingo creation story as a child.
