CQUniversity animal behaviour researcher Dr Bradley Smith has brought together emerging research, genetic science, cultural knowledge and the long history of human-dingo relations for a comprehensive new book examining Australia’s largest terrestrial predator.
In Canis dingo: Understanding Australia’s Apex Predator, Dr Smith asks: how can we co-exist with dingoes, and what will we lose if we cannot?
A mine site in Western Australia’s Pilbara offered Dr Smith a rare opportunity to observe free-ranging dingoes in their natural habitat, while also studying how they lived alongside people.
He was excited to observe packs and to see pups at breeding season, but that excitement was quickly deflated.
“One miner who’d had his lunchbox stolen from the back of his ute told me, ‘They’re a bloody pest. Why don’t we just get rid of the lot of them?’” Dr Smith said.
The comment reflected a broader attitude that has shaped dingo management since European colonisation. Wildlife is tolerated only while it does not interfere with human activities.
“Throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the CSIRO dingo research program was explicitly trying to understand: how can we kill dingos better?” Dr Smith explained.
“The work was funded by the livestock industry, and one research publication even summed up the approach as ‘know thine enemy’.”
The controversy in science and public discourse remains to this day.
Canis dingo draws on emerging research, historical records and Dr Smith’s own fieldwork to tackle dingo misconceptions and myths.
While the science has advanced, Dr Smith warns that continued misinformation places dingo populations at risk, contributes to ecosystem degradation and fails to recognise their profound cultural importance to many First Nations peoples.
In Canis dingo, Dr Smith argues that the dingo’s identity cannot be determined by any single label. Instead, he draws together cultural, ecological, legal, physical and genetic evidence showing that, among other things, thousands of years of natural selection in Australia have shaped the dingo into a distinct wild canid, ecologically adapted to the Australian landscape and different from both its ancestors and modern free-ranging domestic dogs.
Canis dingo: Understanding Australia’s apex predator is out now with CSIRO Publishing.
