Alpine Dingoes

A pair of rare alpine dingoes is heading north to call the Fraser Coast home. TESS Wildlife Sanctuary supervisor Ray Revill said yesterday that Queensland’s Department of Environment had told him this week that he could bring the dingoes from Victoria providing he built the fenced enclosure “according to our rules”. “I just have to raise the money to build the dingoes’ new home and I need to pay $600 to the wildlife sanctuary down south to buy the pups and $240 to fly them up here.” The dingoes, a male and female, are three months old. “One is reddish-blond and the other black and tan. They are both beautiful dogs and DNA tests done on them show they are pure dingo. There’s no dog in them at all.” Mr Revill said he had tried to convince EPA to let him have a couple of Fraser Island dingoes for his sanctuary “for educational purposes”. But they told me those dogs over there had never been successfully held or able to breed in captivity. “I was a ranger on the island for over seven years so I dispute that but rules are rules.”

The alpine dingo, a sub-species of the dingo, is on the verge of extinction. Former CSIRO dingo specialist Alan Newsome, who led the last investigation undertaken on the dingo more than 20 years ago, said in the late ’90s that the dingo was slowly but surely being wiped out as a result of cross-breeding or hybridisation with domestic breeds of dog that had turned feral. Les Hall of Griffith, one of only three breeders of alpine dingo in New South Wales at the time, said there were only 10 breeding pairs of the alpine dingo left in captivity in New South Wales and 25 in Australia. Estimates of wild alpine dingoes vary at around the 150 mark. Biologists consider a species to be extinct when there are fewer than 500. *Fraser Coast Chronicle

Ed Comment; Unfortunately the NSW Government has been aerial dropping 1080 poison over the alpine dingo habitat, to protect sheep farmers from stock losses. Like so many other species of wildlife, the Australian dingo is unlikey to survive in the wild, especially the alpines.