Wildlife advocacy initiative Defend the Wild has called on the Andrews Government to halt the killing of Victoria's threatened dingoes after harrowing footage of dingoes being trapped and shot obtained by the group was revealed on the ABC's 7.30 Report last night.
With heightened awareness of the threats to native wildlife from diminishing habitat and climate change, it is not acceptable to the Australian public to kill any threatened species for the convenience of the agriculture industry, the initiative's campaign director Alix Livingstone said.
The Victorian Government reported killing 1376 dingoes in 2021-22, which is more than the 1249 livestock reported to have been killed by predation out of 22 million livestock in Victoria.
"Dingoes are listed as a threatened, protected species in Victoria. Despite this, the Victorian Government is 'unprotecting' them to target dingoes with cruel lethal control programs for the sake of protecting the commercial interests of sheep farmers," Ms Livingstone said.
"Dingoes are integral to the preservation of Australia's ecosystems and are culturally significant to many First Nations people. It is incredibly short-sighted to callously eradicate a keystone species for the sake of protecting animals who will eventually be killed to be sold for profit," she said.
"Inconceivably, the Andrews Government has a $120 bounty on the head of every dingo killed, encouraging the slaughter of this threatened species."
"Tasmanian tigers were once the subject of a bounty to appease agricultural interests and we all know the result of that."
Defend the Wild said the Andrews Government should end the deceptive labelling of dingoes as "wild dogs", which seeks to disguise the fact a native species is being hunted for commercial interests amid a biodiversity and climate crisis.
The work of biologists had shown that a majority of so-called "wild dogs" are predominantly dingoes, fulfilling the important ecological role as biodiversity regulators.
"Killing programs act to fracture dingo family units and many ecologists suggest that lethal control can exacerbate the potential of predation on farms, rather than diminish it, as dingoes are more likely to roam when their local pack is broken up while new dingoes can enter the territory," Ms Livingstone said.
Dingoes are unfairly being blamed for the high rate of lamb deaths on Australian farms, which studies had shown are largely due to farm management issues.
"Ten million lambs die in the first 24 hours of life in Australia with 80 per cent of these deaths attributed to accepted farm management practices such as breeding for multiple births and exposure to the elements," she said. "Conversely, predation (by dingoes and all other species including foxes) accounts for less than 7 per cent of lamb deaths," Ms Livingstone said.
Defend The Wild has urged the Andrews Government to act on the recommendations of last year's report from the parliamentary Inquiry into Ecosystem Decline in Victoria which recommended revoking the ministerial exemption that allowed dingoes to be declared "unprotected" in certain areas, promoting non-lethal strategies to protect livestock and reviewing the "wild dog" bounty.
"We have non-lethal alternatives available to us now, such as exclusion fencing, that the State Government should look at subsidising instead of investing millions in poisoning dingoes, along with any other native species that consume the poison baits in our national parks."
This investigation was conducted in collaboration with Farm Transparency Project over two weeks earlier this year.
