For decades, people have believed this dingo myth. DNA testing has revealed the truth

Truck driver and amateur photographer Ian Brown was hiking through Kosciuszko National Park when he stumbled onto an increasingly rare scene.

Curled up in a clearing in the bushfire-blackened landscape were six Alpine dingoes, their brindle coats camouflaging with the dusky colours of the bush.

“We just stared at each other for about 10 seconds,” Brown said. “They’re a very rare sighting in the wild. If I do see one, I feel blessed.”

That was two years ago. Brown – a regular visitor to the park – fears the pack is now dead. He says after years of 1080 baiting operations conducted by the NSW government and National Parks and Wildlife Service, it has become increasingly rare to see dingoes in Kosciuszko.

“They’ve been baited nearly into extinction up there,” he says.

Dingoes are one of Australia’s few remaining apex predators, hunted and feared. Like the wolves of North America and Europe, Australia’s dingoes are misunderstood and despised by many. But their destruction can have cascading impacts across entire ecosystems.

The wild dog myth

Dingoes are not protected, despite being a native species, and are threatened in much of the country. In some parts of the country, including the western district of NSW and Queensland, people are legally required to kill “wild dogs”, including dingoes.

The justification for killing them is the long-held understanding that dingoes and domestic dogs have interbred over more than two centuries since colonisation, resulting in a mongrel pest that targets livestock and native animals alike.

But recent groundbreaking DNA testing work by University of NSW geneticist Dr Kylie Cairns and others has upended decades of accepted wisdom on the wild dog question.

A dingo with an orange-coloured coat in the Kosciuszko National Park. Campaigners have called for greater protections for dingoes, which are facing localised extinctions across Australia.Credit: Ian Brown

In research published last year in Molecular Ecology, scientists undertook comprehensive DNA testing on 307 wild animals from across Australia. They found that contrary to popular belief, about 90 per cent of them were pure dingoes, not hybrids.

Of the 62 Victorian animals examined, nearly 90 per cent were “pure” dingoes – with 99.99 per cent dingo DNA. In NSW, more than 60 per cent of the animals tested were pure, and only two animals had less than 70 per cent dingo DNA.

Earlier this year, Brown came across a dead canine in northern Kosciusko. The colours of its mottled fur – ranging from orange to black, grey and white – might lead many to conclude it was a feral or wild dog.

Not Brown. Seeking to prove a point, he snipped off the tip of one of its ears, sending it to Cairns for testing.

In a report seen by this masthead, Cairns concluded the dingo was 99.99 per cent pure dingo and zero per cent dog.

“Ancestry analyses are based on more than 150,000 genetic markers compared to previous dingo DNA testing methods, which rely on only 23 markers,” her report stated.

“It’s important to note that whilst it is harder to ID the ancestry components of specific dog breeds, dingoes are easily distinguishable from domestic dogs using modern genetic testing. This is because dingoes and dogs were distinct from each other more than 5000 years ago, compared to most dog breeds only becoming distinct in the last 200 to 300 years.”

Driving the “wild dog” myth is the commonly held belief that only “pure” dingoes are orange with white markings, while any other colourations indicate interbreeding with dogs. Depending on their locations, however, dingoes can also have brindle, sable, black and tan (strikingly similar to kelpies), or piebald pelts.

Brown last year sent separate ear clip samples from canines that had been killed at Nimmo, to the east of the Kosciuszko National Park, and strung up on a tree.

One sample had deteriorated and could not be investigated, but two were usable. Of those, one was from a “typical” looking orange dingo – at 99.99 per cent purity – while the other was almost completely white with patches of orange on its flanks, rump and ears. That sample, too, showed 99.99 per cent dingo DNA.

“Both animals with successful DNA tests from the Nimmo Road ‘dog tree’ tested as a pure dingo with no evidence of domestic dog ancestry,” Cairns found.

“They clustered with dingoes from the south dingo population that is found in southern NSW, ACT and eastern Victoria, which is consistent with their geographical origin.”

A dingo in Kosciuszko National Park similar to the one Ian Brown had DNA tested.Credit: Ian Brown

NSW defines wild dogs as including feral dogs, dingoes and their hybrids, and considers them in the same category as “pest animals and weeds”.

Despite acknowledging their ecological roles in some parts of the state, the NSW wild dog strategy relies on the assumption the “dingo is an ancient lineage of wild-living dog, which is similar to and not distinct from domestic dogs”.

A spokesman for NSW Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty said: “The economic, environmental and social impacts of wild dogs in NSW cannot be underestimated.

“Wild dog attacks on livestock and increasing biosecurity risks from the spread of disease can have major financial impacts on farmers.

“NSW focuses on the specific areas where control needs to be conducted, rather than targeting particular wild dog genetics. The most effective method to reduce wild dog impacts is baiting.”

A NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service spokesperson said the service had a statutory obligation under the Biosecurity Act 2015 to control wild dogs and foxes on land it manages.

David Pollock says there is a better way to treat dingoes.Credit: Wooleen Station

But there is another way.

David Pollock manages Wooleen cattle station in the Murchison region of Western Australia, which is taking an unorthodox approach to dingo management. Rather than treating dingoes as threats, Pollock and his family coexist with dingoes, which control rampant numbers of kangaroos, as well as feral foxes and goats.

While he can understand the perspective of sheep farmers, including some of his neighbours, who are frustrated by the devastation dingoes can bring to sheep flocks, Pollock believes there is something deeper driving settler Australians’ antipathy to dingoes.

“I think the term ‘wild dogs’ came about because we wanted them to be more terrifying than they were, so we could justify our dislike of them,” he says.

“The wild dog [myth] is the biggest one because no one likes a wild dog – including me. The only thing is, they don’t really exist.

“I’m not saying there aren’t some feral dogs running around. The thing is, they don’t run around the bush or in the wild. They live at the edge of town, or in a town rubbish dump, or on a mine site where there’s roadkill, or an Aboriginal community … in order to survive, they need humans.”

In Aboriginal cultures, dingoes occupy an iconic status – just as important as the Rainbow Serpent, according to one leading First Nations dingo advocate.

Last year, 20 First Nations groups signed an open letter that declared, “killing dingoes is killing family”.

Jirrbal Rainforest woman Sonya Takau says Australia’s relationship with dingoes has ugly echoes of our colonial past.

“We do not support the use of the term ‘wild dog’,” the letter stated. “This term diminishes the dingo. It is a deliberate misrepresentation to justify killing. It disrespects and disregards culture.”

Sonya Takau is a Jirrbal Rainforest Aboriginal woman and one of the chief drivers of the declaration. In describing dingoes as “wild dogs” or questioning their “purity”, Takau sees echoes of Australia’s colonial history.

“Western culture has made society believe that they’re an invasive species and that they’re readily mating with domestic dogs and therefore are not pure any more,” she says of dingoes.

“This thing of ‘purity’? I’m over it … I’m three-quarters Aboriginal; are you saying I’m not Aboriginal? It’s that colonial mindset that just keeps surfacing … we have to stop thinking that way. We’ve got to start looking outside the box and seeing the value of these animals within the landscape.”

Takau believes states and territories should urgently examine their “wild dog” policies and laws.

“There is no reflection to cater for the cultural values of the dingo in legislation; it’s all about the interest of the farming industry, which is very biased in my eyes – and it’s not fair at all.”

Researchers are increasingly busting the “wild dog” myth.Credit: Ian Brown/Michell J Photography & Equine

In Victoria’s 16 “wild dog management zones”, there were 1,744,689 head of livestock in the 2022–23 financial year. Of these, 1455 were confirmed as having been killed by dingoes – about 0.08 per cent of total stock numbers. The environment department calculates there are between 2680 and 9030 dingoes remaining in Victoria.

The Victorian government acknowledges that “hybridisation between domestic dogs and dingoes is much less common than previously thought”. Nonetheless, in September, it extended an order removing protections for dingoes in the south-east of the state, citing the risks of dingo predation on livestock.

That decision is now the subject of litigation by Animals Australia, which is suing the attorney-general in the Supreme Court of Victoria for the state’s alleged failure to protect dingoes.

Legal counsel Shatha Hamade said the government had ignored pleas from traditional owners who treasured the dingo as a totem species.

“History has shown that these government-sanctioned killings have almost wiped out the north-west dingoes,” she said.

“Dingoes in the north-east are clearly facing the same trajectory to extinction. In fact, they are well on their way to extinction.”

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