Mitchell's Gill Campbell co-authors paper on benefits of dingoes

The paper - Can dingoes increase graziers' profits and help maintain Australia's rangelands? - was authored by three cattlemen, plus environmental campaigner Barry Traill, and has been published in the peer-reviewed Australian Rangelands Journal, a CSIRO publication.

It details their experiences in keeping wild dog populations on their working cattle properties, which they say saw their profits increase, thanks to a reduction in feral goats and kangaroo populations, allowing pasture to rebound.

At the same time, calf losses were zero or minimal.

At the heart of the paper's premise is a belief that cattle businesses should not be obliged to control wild dogs, "if they assess that it would be a significant detriment to their businesses and the environments they manage".

"The Australian pastoral industry as a whole, and the government departments that support it, need to reconsider their approach to dingo control," the paper concludes. "We need to properly assess and openly discuss the economic and ecological benefits as well as the costs of maintaining dingoes in Australian landscapes."

Although the authors acknowledge that sheep and domestic goats need protection from wild dogs, they ask if it's reasonable to expect cattle producers to forego financial and environmental benefits to protect the financial interests of sheep and goat producers.

"There is an obligation to be good neighbours, but there is also a duty to maintain a viable business and a healthy landscape," they say.

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The graziers who contributed to the paper are Gill Campbell, Claravale, Mitchell, Angus Emmott, formerly of Noonbah, Longreach, and David Pollock, Wooleen Station, Murchison, WA.

"Each of us independently trialled not killing dingoes on our properties," Mr Campbell said. "We run different cattle operations in very different types of country, but we all found the same outcomes."

In Mr Campbell's case, he educates his weaners with a team of sheep dogs, which he says takes the fight or flight response away from his young cattle and therefore meant they were less likely to dash off when they saw a wild dog.

"Every animal makes its prey run, and then they eat it," he said. "What I do takes that out of the system."

Based 54 kilometres north north east of Mitchell in what he describes as range country, ideal for dingoes, Mr Campbell said he hadn't killed any wild dogs for 28 years and had 80 per cent weaning rates in his self-replacing breeder herd.

He doesn't use guardian animals because he says he wants to keep wild dogs on the property for environmental reasons, not chase them away, and says keeping mature alpha male dogs at the top of the pack is the secret to their success.

"The alpha males control the pack, plus they keep other dogs out, and fox numbers are way down," he said. "There's no real reason I stopped (killing wild dogs), but we've been trying to wipe them out forever and it's not working."

He speculated that other graziers were just not willing to risk not killing wild dogs.

The grazing trio said it was concerned by "the singular focus of Meat & Livestock Australia and Australian Wool Innovation on nationwide lethal control, including killing dingoes in regions far distant from sheep country".

The paper argues that European settlers, because of their experience with large terrestrial predators on other continents, saw dingoes as a threat to their livestock, and therefore mirrored the responses elsewhere, by attempting to eradicate them over extensive areas in Australia.

"This continued lethal control of dingoes in Australia has...a view that dingoes are a significant predator of all types of domestic livestock, and dingoes will therefore always reduce the profitability of grazing enterprises," it said.

In response, an MLA spokesperson said the interactions wild dogs had within grazing enterprises was complex, depending on the regional environment.

They said they sought to demonstrate locally tailored and novel control approaches to deliver landscape-scale management and monitoring of wild dogs, pointing to the three Producer Demonstration Site projects that were focusing on predator control and exploring best management practices to improved calving and lambing rates.

"MLA is open to supporting PDS projects where producers wish to trial the implementation of management practices new to their business," the spokesperson said. "In the case of predators this can be through lethal and non-lethal control methods. MLA annually calls for PDS project expressions of interest."

AgForce CEO Mike Guerin took a diplomatic tack, saying that industry always welcomed new science and learnings, and applying it across the landscape.

"There's a lot of scientific evidence to show the value of managing wild dogs but new learnings are always considered," he said.

"One piece of research doesn't automatically negate all previous work - it can't be taken in isolation.

"AgForce encourages all people to work together."

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