Dingoes given breeding boost

October 31, 2005

Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

The survival of purebred dingoes in the wild may depend on an artificial insemination program.

The Dingo Species Recovery Program has been devised by a research group comprising Monash University's Norwood Animal Conservation Group and the Dingo Care Network.

The groups will collect and freeze sperm and ovaries from purebred dingoes in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries throughout Australia. They hope to inseminate purebred female dingoes and breed the species.

However, the organisers are still trying to raise $10,000 to begin the artificial insemination phase of the program, which they hope to start in six to 12 months.

The secretary of the Dingo Care Network, Ernest Healy, said dingoes crossbreeding with other wild dogs, as well as government-sponsored baiting and trapping programs, meant wild dingoes could be extinct within 20 years.

"Government- and state-sponsored wild dog poisoning programs are completely indiscriminate about what they kill," Dr Healy said.

"They're just focused on what they see as wild dogs, and that can potentially cover everything from foxes through to the small remaining pockets of pure dingoes."

Dr Healy said governments and farmers had exaggerated dingoes' propensity to kill livestock: they did not normally prey on farm animals.

"They will, under duress. If there's been a bushfire through, or lack of normal diet, they will resort to killing sheep but that is not their preferred diet," Dr Healy said.

Purebred dingoes were not as aggressive, or as great a threat to livestock, as those that were half bred with other wild dog breeds, the president of the Victorian Farmers Federation, Simon Ramsay, said.

Dog hunters did not indiscriminately kill dogs but targeted dogs that were doing the damage, he said. "It's wrong to suggest half-breed dogs are not killing a lot of stock, they're actually getting rid of industries," Mr Ramsay said.

The director of the Dingo Species Recovery Program, Shae-Lee Cox, said it was hoped between 50 and 100 dingoes would be bred over the next five to 10 years.

The hope was that the dingoes would be kept in captivity until it was possible to release them into the wild but she said it was more likely the species would become extinct in the wild and dingoes bred under the program would survive only in sanctuaries.

