Sydney Pet Rescue & Adoption, has launched the Animal Flood Victims Emergency Appeal, and together with various other rescue groups, they are working hard to raise funds to support animals affected by the recent devastating floods in Qld. The Wildlife Protection Association of Australia is one of the organisations they have chosen to support with the Appeal. We will be using the funds they raise to support foster carers in the worst affected and priority areas, with financial support to assist with the rescue and foster care of wildlife. ……….We thank SPRA and all the rescue groups who are working hard with them, for their support…..
Please click on this link to find out more about the appeal: SPRA Flood Animal Appeal Here!
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Fraser Dingoes 18/1/11
Dingoes
The dingo that attacked a Korean tourist on Fraser Island at the weekend will be killed if it can be identified. The incident early on Sunday morning saw the 41-year-old tourist bitten on the leg, hand and forearm by a dingo on 75 Mile Beach at Eurong. The woman and her friend had been surrounded by a pack of five dingoes when one lunged forward, attacking her. DERM's Regional Manager Ross Belcher said the behaviour of the dingo had posed a clear threat to the safety of visitors and the local community. “If the dingo is positively identified, it will have to be put down to protect public safety,” he said. “Through the introduction of the Dingo Management Strategy the number of dingoes having to be destroyed as a result of dangerous behaviour has decreased from as many as 14 in 2002 to five in 2010. “This incident serves as an ongoing reminder of the unpredictable and dangerous nature of dingoes on Fraser. They are wild animals and need to be treated as such.”
As rangers tried to identify the dingo yesterday politicians and wildlife lobby groups seized on the incident to attack DERM's current dingo management policy. State Member for Hervey Bay Ted Sorensen said Fraser Island was a major tourist attraction and people had the right to be safe from these attacks. “DERM's dingo strategy has never been peer-reviewed and problems identified by the island's visitors and residents have simply been ignored,” he said. Malcom Kilpatrick from Save Fraser Island Dingoes said the bottom line was that the management strategy “had some good points, but it did have problems and they needed to be fixed now”. “If it was the alpha male leader of the pack that attacked the tourist and it is chased down and shot you can just about say goodbye to the other members of the pack because they won't survive without their leader. “That means five dingoes may die because of this one incident and that is a tragedy,” Mr Kilpatrick said. *Fraser Coast Chronicle
The dingo that attacked a Korean tourist on Fraser Island at the weekend will be killed if it can be identified. The incident early on Sunday morning saw the 41-year-old tourist bitten on the leg, hand and forearm by a dingo on 75 Mile Beach at Eurong. The woman and her friend had been surrounded by a pack of five dingoes when one lunged forward, attacking her. DERM's Regional Manager Ross Belcher said the behaviour of the dingo had posed a clear threat to the safety of visitors and the local community. “If the dingo is positively identified, it will have to be put down to protect public safety,” he said. “Through the introduction of the Dingo Management Strategy the number of dingoes having to be destroyed as a result of dangerous behaviour has decreased from as many as 14 in 2002 to five in 2010. “This incident serves as an ongoing reminder of the unpredictable and dangerous nature of dingoes on Fraser. They are wild animals and need to be treated as such.”
As rangers tried to identify the dingo yesterday politicians and wildlife lobby groups seized on the incident to attack DERM's current dingo management policy. State Member for Hervey Bay Ted Sorensen said Fraser Island was a major tourist attraction and people had the right to be safe from these attacks. “DERM's dingo strategy has never been peer-reviewed and problems identified by the island's visitors and residents have simply been ignored,” he said. Malcom Kilpatrick from Save Fraser Island Dingoes said the bottom line was that the management strategy “had some good points, but it did have problems and they needed to be fixed now”. “If it was the alpha male leader of the pack that attacked the tourist and it is chased down and shot you can just about say goodbye to the other members of the pack because they won't survive without their leader. “That means five dingoes may die because of this one incident and that is a tragedy,” Mr Kilpatrick said. *Fraser Coast Chronicle
Friday, January 7, 2011
Fraser Dingoes and Jennifer Parkhurst, 8/1/11
SMH Report
The wildlife photographer Jennifer Parkhurst fell foul of the law trying to protect the island's harried inhabitants, writes Frank Robson.
Jennifer Parkhurst's war with the custodians of Fraser Island's dingoes began when she saw rangers setting traps for the harried animals atop a sand dune. It was 2003, two years after a nine-year-old boy had died in a dingo attack, and the traps were part of the Queensland government's radical crackdown on human-dingo interaction within the world-renowned national park.
Parkhurst, a wildlife photographer, approached the rangers and asked to see the traps. They were the usual cruel-looking devices, but the rangers assured her that a covering of rubber on the jaws meant the dingoes would not be hurt. Once trapped, they would be ear-tagged for identification and then released.
"So I said, 'OK, if they don't hurt, let's pop your arm in one and trigger it,'" Parkhurst says. "But they didn't go for that idea. After that, relations between me and DERM [Queensland's Department of Environment and Resource Management] got steadily worse."
Advertisement: Story continues below Over ensuing years, rangers killed scores of "problem" dingoes and fenced off the island's residential communities and campsites to isolate the animals from humans. Signs were erected and brochures depicting dingoes as fearsome, toothy killers liable to attack at any moment were distributed, with a warning that anyone feeding them would be ordered off the island and fined up to $3000.
Cut off from their human food sources - rubbish tips, camp bins and the island residents who had fed them scraps for decades - and with their natural habitat under siege by up to 350,000 tourists a year, Fraser's native dogs, one of the purest dingo strains left in Australia, became desperate victims of Queensland's bizarre tourism-native species juggling act.
Snapshots by island residents show emaciated dingoes standing plaintively outside the communities' electrified cattle grids or dragging legs injured by the department's "harmless" traps or being "hazed" (shot at by rangers with slingshots and pellets) away from carloads of excitable backpackers. In some cases, autopsies of those killed by rangers revealed nothing in their stomachs but sand or plastic waste or grass.
"To see these beautiful animals in that condition broke my heart," Parkhurst says. "The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service [a department agency] estimates there are more than 200 dingoes on the island, but even allowing for seasonal breeding variations I think there are a lot less than that."
For years, Parkhurst, 43, travelled daily from her home at Rainbow Beach to photograph one of the island's 10 dingo packs at Hook Point, on Fraser's southern tip.
Increasingly at odds with the rangers, who suspected her of illegally feeding the pack, she was woken early on August 25, 2009, by five department officials and a policeman, who had a warrant to search her home.
Six hours later, they left, taking all her computer files about dingoes, including a book she was writing, 90 department dingo autopsy reports she had obtained through freedom-of-information searches, and her spirited analysis of the department's dingo management stuff-ups. They took her still and video footage of dingoes, her journals, field notes and even photos of "K9", her pet dog of 16 years which died not long before the raid. (Most of the material has yet to be returned.)
On November 3 last year, Parkhurst appeared in Maryborough Magistrates Court and pleaded guilty to 46 charges related to feeding and "disturbing" dingoes in the Great Sandy National Park (Fraser Island) between July 2008 and August 2009.
Pleading not guilty wasn't an option: among the videos seized was footage of her feeding members of the Hook Point dingo pack and celebrating Christmas Day 2008, with the pack and her now former boyfriend. Parkhurst is heard to say: "Three roast chickens … disappeared in seconds, but gee whiz, they loved it."
(The videos seized also contained footage shot by Parkhurst of a veteran ranger, Les Gallehawk, feeding dingoes a bucket of fish at the same location. Gallehawk was sacked and fined $300 for his action last year. "I'm not allowed to say anything about it," he said from his home. "I had to sign an agreement after I got sacked.")
She was fined $40,000 and received a nine-month jail term, suspended for three years. The magistrate, John Smith, referred to the "deliberate nature" of Parkhurst's offending, saying she had engaged in a covert campaign over a long period and had sought to hide her offending from rangers.
At her home, Parkhurst told the Herald she had been made a scapegoat for the department's flawed management of Fraser Island. She believes the harshness of her sentence was linked to her role as an activist against the government's treatment of island dingoes. "I have to take responsibility for what I did," she adds, "but I don't accept that feeding starving animals makes them dangerous. I believe if everyone was feeding them - as residents and rangers used to - they would be less of a risk to visitors, not more."
Before her court appearance, rangers killed five of the juvenile dingoes Parkhurst had fed and given names to, claiming they had become habituated and had "attacked" humans. "My actions put the spotlight on that pack, and that's what got them killed. That's what I'm remorseful about … yet I hope people can understand how horrific it was watching those animals starving. It's such a slow, cruel, horrible process."
Sydney Morning Herald 8/1/11
The wildlife photographer Jennifer Parkhurst fell foul of the law trying to protect the island's harried inhabitants, writes Frank Robson.
Jennifer Parkhurst's war with the custodians of Fraser Island's dingoes began when she saw rangers setting traps for the harried animals atop a sand dune. It was 2003, two years after a nine-year-old boy had died in a dingo attack, and the traps were part of the Queensland government's radical crackdown on human-dingo interaction within the world-renowned national park.
Parkhurst, a wildlife photographer, approached the rangers and asked to see the traps. They were the usual cruel-looking devices, but the rangers assured her that a covering of rubber on the jaws meant the dingoes would not be hurt. Once trapped, they would be ear-tagged for identification and then released.
"So I said, 'OK, if they don't hurt, let's pop your arm in one and trigger it,'" Parkhurst says. "But they didn't go for that idea. After that, relations between me and DERM [Queensland's Department of Environment and Resource Management] got steadily worse."
Advertisement: Story continues below Over ensuing years, rangers killed scores of "problem" dingoes and fenced off the island's residential communities and campsites to isolate the animals from humans. Signs were erected and brochures depicting dingoes as fearsome, toothy killers liable to attack at any moment were distributed, with a warning that anyone feeding them would be ordered off the island and fined up to $3000.
Cut off from their human food sources - rubbish tips, camp bins and the island residents who had fed them scraps for decades - and with their natural habitat under siege by up to 350,000 tourists a year, Fraser's native dogs, one of the purest dingo strains left in Australia, became desperate victims of Queensland's bizarre tourism-native species juggling act.
Snapshots by island residents show emaciated dingoes standing plaintively outside the communities' electrified cattle grids or dragging legs injured by the department's "harmless" traps or being "hazed" (shot at by rangers with slingshots and pellets) away from carloads of excitable backpackers. In some cases, autopsies of those killed by rangers revealed nothing in their stomachs but sand or plastic waste or grass.
"To see these beautiful animals in that condition broke my heart," Parkhurst says. "The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service [a department agency] estimates there are more than 200 dingoes on the island, but even allowing for seasonal breeding variations I think there are a lot less than that."
For years, Parkhurst, 43, travelled daily from her home at Rainbow Beach to photograph one of the island's 10 dingo packs at Hook Point, on Fraser's southern tip.
Increasingly at odds with the rangers, who suspected her of illegally feeding the pack, she was woken early on August 25, 2009, by five department officials and a policeman, who had a warrant to search her home.
Six hours later, they left, taking all her computer files about dingoes, including a book she was writing, 90 department dingo autopsy reports she had obtained through freedom-of-information searches, and her spirited analysis of the department's dingo management stuff-ups. They took her still and video footage of dingoes, her journals, field notes and even photos of "K9", her pet dog of 16 years which died not long before the raid. (Most of the material has yet to be returned.)
On November 3 last year, Parkhurst appeared in Maryborough Magistrates Court and pleaded guilty to 46 charges related to feeding and "disturbing" dingoes in the Great Sandy National Park (Fraser Island) between July 2008 and August 2009.
Pleading not guilty wasn't an option: among the videos seized was footage of her feeding members of the Hook Point dingo pack and celebrating Christmas Day 2008, with the pack and her now former boyfriend. Parkhurst is heard to say: "Three roast chickens … disappeared in seconds, but gee whiz, they loved it."
(The videos seized also contained footage shot by Parkhurst of a veteran ranger, Les Gallehawk, feeding dingoes a bucket of fish at the same location. Gallehawk was sacked and fined $300 for his action last year. "I'm not allowed to say anything about it," he said from his home. "I had to sign an agreement after I got sacked.")
She was fined $40,000 and received a nine-month jail term, suspended for three years. The magistrate, John Smith, referred to the "deliberate nature" of Parkhurst's offending, saying she had engaged in a covert campaign over a long period and had sought to hide her offending from rangers.
At her home, Parkhurst told the Herald she had been made a scapegoat for the department's flawed management of Fraser Island. She believes the harshness of her sentence was linked to her role as an activist against the government's treatment of island dingoes. "I have to take responsibility for what I did," she adds, "but I don't accept that feeding starving animals makes them dangerous. I believe if everyone was feeding them - as residents and rangers used to - they would be less of a risk to visitors, not more."
Before her court appearance, rangers killed five of the juvenile dingoes Parkhurst had fed and given names to, claiming they had become habituated and had "attacked" humans. "My actions put the spotlight on that pack, and that's what got them killed. That's what I'm remorseful about … yet I hope people can understand how horrific it was watching those animals starving. It's such a slow, cruel, horrible process."
Sydney Morning Herald 8/1/11
Fraser Dingoes, 8/1/11
AMONG Fraser Island's 100 or so permanent residents, stories vary about the circumstances leading to the killing of a nine-year-old Brisbane boy, Clinton Gage, by two dingoes near Waddy Point, on the island's northern tip, on April 30, 2001.
Some say Clinton and his younger brother Dylan (who was bitten but survived) were seen by other campers taunting and throwing things at the animals; others believe an earlier severe bushfire wiped out food sources and created a "dangerous mood" among two near-starving dingo packs competing for scraps in the area where Clinton was killed.
Whatever the cause, the tragedy was the catalyst for all that followed. According to a dingo researcher, Dr Ian Gunn, the state government's harsh treatment of the island's dwindling dog packs has brought them to the edge of extinction.
Advertisement: Story continues below "The detailed studies and records collected by Jennifer Parkhurst have exposed the dingoes' plight," the Monash University vet, who heads the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program, said.
"Things like starvation, poor survival of pups, inhumane treatment of dogs through tagging and culling methods, and hassling by visitors must be addressed immediately to save these animals from impending extinction."
The Queensland Department of Environmental Resource Management does not accept the dingoes are starving. Its website says they have enough natural food sources, but are "naturally lean" and subject to seasonal and pack-status weight variations.
To support this, the site displays four photographs of what it says is the same female juvenile - identified by its ear tag as "purple/yellow/yellow"- observed over 11 months. In the first photo the dingo appears to be starving; the others show a dated progression as it "regained weight quickly".
But a Fraser Island resident, Judi Daniel, says the department item shows three different dingoes.
"It's a complete concoction," the retired journalist said at her home in the village of Eurong. "I took the first photo of the starving female, which died soon afterwards in a fight with other dingoes, and it ended up on various websites.
''Without my permission, DERM hooked it off the net and used it as part of its propaganda beat-up."
Daniel said the next two photos in the department series did show the "purple/yellow/yellow" dingo, but the last photo was another ring-in with a different-coloured ear tag.
Terry Harper, the general manager of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, admitted the first photo in the series was taken by Daniel, but insisted only one dingo is shown: "Although it lost its ear tag [at some stage] … all the photos are of the same animal."
Daniel says rumours persist that rangers are under instruction to secretly feed dingoes to avoid bad publicity over them starving.
"The crazy thing about all this is that dingoes are very social animals,'' she said. ''They were camp dogs with the island's Aborigines for thousands of years, and they actually like people.
''Then, suddenly, they're tagged, demonised, brutalised and confronted daily by tourists who shriek and scream at the sight of them. And they just don't understand why." Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 8. 2011
Some say Clinton and his younger brother Dylan (who was bitten but survived) were seen by other campers taunting and throwing things at the animals; others believe an earlier severe bushfire wiped out food sources and created a "dangerous mood" among two near-starving dingo packs competing for scraps in the area where Clinton was killed.
Whatever the cause, the tragedy was the catalyst for all that followed. According to a dingo researcher, Dr Ian Gunn, the state government's harsh treatment of the island's dwindling dog packs has brought them to the edge of extinction.
Advertisement: Story continues below "The detailed studies and records collected by Jennifer Parkhurst have exposed the dingoes' plight," the Monash University vet, who heads the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program, said.
"Things like starvation, poor survival of pups, inhumane treatment of dogs through tagging and culling methods, and hassling by visitors must be addressed immediately to save these animals from impending extinction."
The Queensland Department of Environmental Resource Management does not accept the dingoes are starving. Its website says they have enough natural food sources, but are "naturally lean" and subject to seasonal and pack-status weight variations.
To support this, the site displays four photographs of what it says is the same female juvenile - identified by its ear tag as "purple/yellow/yellow"- observed over 11 months. In the first photo the dingo appears to be starving; the others show a dated progression as it "regained weight quickly".
But a Fraser Island resident, Judi Daniel, says the department item shows three different dingoes.
"It's a complete concoction," the retired journalist said at her home in the village of Eurong. "I took the first photo of the starving female, which died soon afterwards in a fight with other dingoes, and it ended up on various websites.
''Without my permission, DERM hooked it off the net and used it as part of its propaganda beat-up."
Daniel said the next two photos in the department series did show the "purple/yellow/yellow" dingo, but the last photo was another ring-in with a different-coloured ear tag.
Terry Harper, the general manager of the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, admitted the first photo in the series was taken by Daniel, but insisted only one dingo is shown: "Although it lost its ear tag [at some stage] … all the photos are of the same animal."
Daniel says rumours persist that rangers are under instruction to secretly feed dingoes to avoid bad publicity over them starving.
"The crazy thing about all this is that dingoes are very social animals,'' she said. ''They were camp dogs with the island's Aborigines for thousands of years, and they actually like people.
''Then, suddenly, they're tagged, demonised, brutalised and confronted daily by tourists who shriek and scream at the sight of them. And they just don't understand why." Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 8. 2011
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