DINGO

For over 200 years, dingos have been blamed, hunted, and pushed to the brink. But science shows they're vital to Australia's ecosystems.

Dingos have been reviled as the scapegoat for sheep farmers' financial struggles since the early colonial years. Governments responded with bounties for killing dingos and by building huge fences across multiple states. The livestock industry has claimed dingos were recent arrivals so not to be regarded as proper native animals, and that interbreeding with feral domestic dogs has corrupted dingo bloodlines and justifies continuing to target them as 'wild dogs'. Fractious tourist interactions at Uluru and attacks on K'gari keep negative stories about dingos in the news.

But the tide is turning. Research study after research study shows there's little interbreeding with domestic dogs, that dingos have been on this continent for a good 5,000 years or more, and that as Australia's leading apex predator, they play an integral role in maintaining ecological balance, including by keeping kangaroos and wild pigs and goats in check. Yet two centuries of wild dog bounties and poisoning has dingos increasingly heading the way of the Thylacine and for the same reasons. Will Australia be willing to protect the dingo before it's too late?

ROLAND BRECKWOLDT is a leading advisor on agriculture and the environment and an expert on dingos. He was made a Fellow of the University of New England and has been an Honorary Lecturer in the Fenner School for Environment and Society and a Visiting Fellow in Human Science at the Australian National University. He is the author of the highly acclaimed books, and has twice been the winner of the Royal Zoological Society's Whitley Medal.