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Experts lobby for dingo preservation

29 April 2009

A team of Monash researchers has successfully lobbied the Victorian government to list the State's dingo as a threatened species.

As a result the dingo is now classified as wildlife, rather than as a pest animal.

Dr Ian Gunn from the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Dr Ernest Healy from the Faculty of Arts and manager Property Services Wayne Brundell have played a pivotal role in successfully lobbying the Victorian government to list the State's dingo as a threatened species.

The team has also been involved in establishing the National Dingo Recovery and Preservation Program (NDPRP), which aims to ensure that remaining populations of the dingo survive throughout Australia.

The NDPRP will record and store the origin, lineage and DNA information of dingo populations of high conservation value.

Dr Gunn, who works with the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, said the process aimed to retain the purity of the dingo species.

"Unfortunately the dingo is being cross-bred either purposefully or in the wild with feral dogs," Dr Gunn said.

"One of the ways we can retain purity is to store the sperm, cell lines or DNA of the pure bred animal for future use in assisted breeding programs," Dr Gunn said.

The Animal Gene Storage and Resource Centre of Australia at MISCL will play a pivotal role in this process.

Dr Healy, who is a research fellow in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, said although the dingo was likely to have been introduced from Indonesia between 3500 and 5000 thousand years ago, the species was an important part of the nation's natural and cultural history.

"By the time Europeans arrived the dingo had become integral to Australian ecosystems and had been incorporated into Aboriginal culture, used as hunting companions and guard dogs," Dr Healy said.