Shooting of pet dingoes reignites emotional debate over the animal’s place in Australia

Dingoes are part of Australia’s wild landscape. 

They have roamed for thousands of years, their presence woven into the country’s culture and ecosystems.

But when two pet dingoes were shot in the outback, their deaths reignited debate over the animal’s place in Australia and whether they can live alongside cattle and sheep. 

Their increasing presence in areas where farmers are grazing livestock is creating a complex and emotive challenge.

WARNING: This story contains images that some people may find distressing.

Rossco and Dave are mates, sort of. 

They’ve both grown up on the land but they disagree on the best way to manage it.

David Pollock advocates for dingoes to control goat and kangaroo populations, while Rossco Foulkes-Taylor believes dingoes should be managed to protect livestock.

Over time, they’ve agreed to disagree and continued with their work.

David promoted his views through keeping two hand-raised pet dingoes Eulalia and Steve on his property Wooleen Station. 

Their presence was controversial but also symbolic of the property’s unique attitude towards apex predators in the landscape.

The Murchison Shire, one of the largest in Western Australia at 50,000 square kilometres but with only 150 residents, is mostly pastoral land.

The majority of people living in the shire do not share David’s views and they bait, trap and shoot dingoes to protect their livestock. 

Despite the polarised opinion, the community has coexisted — until recently, when everything changed.

Shots fired

One day in late September, Steve and Eulalia didn’t return home to their cage after a daily morning walk and roam.

“As soon as it got light in the morning [the next day], we went looking for them … and we found that they’d been shot on the side of the road,” David says.

Their bodies have not been found, but David discovered expired and misfired bullets by the side of a road, pools of blood on the red dirt, and drag marks which he says shows where the shooter loaded their remains into a vehicle.

Zali Jestrimski works at Wooleen Station with David and Frances Pollock and spent most of her time as the main caretaker of the two pet dingoes and led dingo tours for tourists at the property.

She is a PHD student looking into whether dingoes influence vegetation dynamics in the southern rangelands.

“I just kept saying I didn’t believe it and I needed to see. I didn’t want to believe it,” she says.

“We went out and looked at where they had been shot and all I really wanted was to see them, their bodies, but I kind of knew at that point that I’d never see them again.

“If I had have seen them scalped for the bounty, that would have been really tough to see.”

Bred to kill things

Sheep producer Chris Patmore has found his sheep scattered across paddocks dying with their intestines torn out from dog attacks. 

It has been left to him to end their suffering.

“They’re bred over thousands of years to kill things. That’s what they do,” he says.

He has little time for the dingo, or wild dog as they’re often known, labelling them a threat for Western Australia’s $1.3 billion sheep industry.

Chris farms 300 kilometres south of the Murchison, but he believes dogs are flowing on to his land from the northern pastoral region.

“I think if the dog control stops … then it’ll only take two or three years and there’ll be dogs right through to the coast in the Perth Hills, the Great Southern, the South-West,” he says.

To protect his flock, Chris uses every method at his disposal — baiting, trapping and shooting dogs where possible.

He says the damage from dog attacks is both mental and financial, impacting his and many other sheep-based businesses.

Coexistence with wild dogs, or dingoes, is not an option.

It’s a common approach taken by many graziers to wild dogs, with hundreds killed though baiting, trapping and shooting every year.

The culture is to kill

At Wooleen, both David and Zali do not know who shot their pet dingoes, and they both say they don’t want to know.

They are instead using their deaths to call for a cultural change within the Murchison community.

“It could have been anyone [who shot them],” David says.

“It is the culture around here to shoot dingoes, so it’s almost certainly someone I know and, in all likelihood, someone I have respect for.

“We’re trying to get the message to everybody in Australia, because dingoes are called wild dogs all over Australia … essentially they’re being lied to.”

Wooleen operates a successful station stay tourism business, and Steve and Eulalia allowed visitors to see the animal the Pollocks believe should be welcomed into the arid pastoral landscape.

David Pollock believes dingoes are key in his mission to restore the landscape at Wooleen after years of overgrazing, because they kill animals like goats and kangaroos which can eat significant volumes of plants and shrubs.

“All the foxes are gone, all the goats are gone, he says. 

“The kangaroo population has gone from contributing 50 per cent of the grazing pressure down to 5 or 10 per cent of the grazing pressure.”

“This issue is very much like the eagles that we used to kill. Everybody used to kill eagles out here … no-one kills eagles anymore.

“The more the scientific evidence comes out to show how important dingoes are in the landscape, we’re going to go the same way.

“Dingoes are incredibly good at managing their own numbers, so managing dingoes means doing absolutely nothing.”

David says this is because dingoes are territorial and pairs remain together while both are alive.

He says Steve had been sterilised.

After their pets died, Wooleen launched an online petition calling for the Murchison Shire to end the $100 bounty it pays for the scalps of wild dogs killed in the shire.

Shooters can collect the bounty if they have evidence of where the animal was shot and a letter of permission to shoot from property owners.

The petition has attracted more than 15,000 signatures from around the world, but attempts to use public pressure to influence the shire to change its wild dog policy have not been well received by the likes of the shire president, Rossco Foulkes-Taylor.

“We have one entity in the shire that actively encourages dingoes to proliferate … while we have a dozen or two other businesses trying to grow food from this region,” Rossco says.

“I’m not really versed in public petitions letting us know which direction we should take.”

Rossco says his council makes decisions based on what most of the community wants.

The Pollocks’ and Zali’s views are not shared by many landowners in the pastoral region who also aspire for best practice in protein production.

They trap and bait wild dogs, and some like the Foulkes-Taylors have gone as far as erecting dog-resistant fencing around their boundaries.

Rossco says the Pollocks did not approach the shire council to consider scrapping the bounty before launching the petition, and he is disappointed the first he heard of it was through the media.

“I’m the president at the moment, I’ll stop the meeting at any time … They know my phone number. They know where we live. They’ve been here to dinner.”

Rossco says he has received phone calls and emails of support from pastoralists in the shire for the bounty to remain, but he’s also been subjected to vitriol and abuse from people outside the region in response to Wooleen’s petition.

“What the keyboard warriors produce late at night from Utah to let me know what a piece of work I am, I don’t think there’s much constructive in that.

“I will try and support the local business as best we can.”

David says the petition is not a personal attack, but when it comes to the online abuse directed at the Foulkes-Taylors and other pastoralists, he “could not take responsibility for the internet”.

“At the end of the day, the people that will be changing the Murchison wild dog bounty, whether we have a wild dog bounty or not, are those councillors,” he says.

“So if there is people that are saying, ‘You should be doing something different, you should be stopping that bounty’, well, I agree they should be.”

So what is a wild dog, and what is a dingo? 

David Pollock claims the term wild dog has been “created essentially so that we can use public funds to kill a native animal”.

He wants to see the term wild dog scrapped, but farmers such as Chris Patmore and Rossco Foulkes-Taylor are less fazed.

“I don’t care what they are, they’re a large canine predator,” Rossco says.

“We use wild dogs as a collective term — it means dingoes, free-roaming dogs and their hybrids, they are all one species, Canis familiaris,” research scientist Dr Tracey Kreplins explains.

She says genetic testing shows dingo purity in WA remains high despite years of ongoing culling in some regions by landowners. 

Despite the images of golden fur and bushy tails, dingoes can appear in several colours.

Under WA’s Biosecurity and Agricultural Management Act wild dogs are declared pests and landowners have a legal obligation to control declared pests on their land.

They are required to pay an annual rate to assist with regional pest and weed control to their local regional biosecurity groups.

Pure dingo = 90% or more dingo DNA  —  Almost dingo = 80-89%  —  Hybrid = 79% or less.

ABC: Chris Lewis

David has refused to pay his rate and contribute to dingo culling, calling it “crazy”.

In what could be seen as a contrast to the BAM Act, under WA’s Biodiversity Conservation Act dingoes are considered native wildlife, but are not protected.

Decline of the sheep industry, rise of the dingo

About 80 per cent of Western Australia’s landscape is broadly known as rangelands — uncleared land often referred to as the outback.

Approximately 40 per cent of the rangelands is used for the production of beef, lamb and wool under a pastoral lease system. The land is owned by the WA government.

Settlement of the rangelands for pastoral activity began in the 1860s, predominantly with sheep moving inland along river systems. 

Within 20 years sheep were grazing from as far north as the Kimberley to the very south of WA near Albany, beginning the battle between sheep farmers and dingoes.

A 1963 paper by Kimberley vermin control officer JJ Freeth referred to dingoes as “the most serious and certainly the most sagacious pest” in the region, and detailed the wild dog control programs active on sheep stations.

Over time, with droughts and poor wool prices, the location of the WA sheep flock has contracted south-west; cattle is now the dominant livestock industry in the Kimberley, Pilbara and Gascoyne and Goldfields.

With a switch to cattle generally comes a somewhat more relaxed approach to dogs in the landscape.

Hamish McTaggart’s father transitioned from sheep to cattle at Bidgemia Station 30 years ago.

The 600,000-hectare property sits on the banks of the Gascoyne River, 180 kilometres inland from Carnarvon.

“My father always said if someone saw a dog track on a windmill run, the world stopped and everybody ran out there to try and catch him,” Hamish says.

“There are definitely more dingoes now than what there was back in the sheep days.

“They don’t have as big an impact on the calves and the cattle; the cattle are a bit stronger, tougher sort of animals and are able to keep the dogs at bay a bit more.”

Hamish says he saw some benefit in having dingoes in the landscape to keep kangaroo numbers down, but he and the crew at Bidgemia still actively control dingoes.

“One dog on his own doesn’t do that much damage, but if you get two or three dogs or a pack of dogs, they can start to work cattle and split calves off; you’ve just got to try and keep the problem as small as you possibly can,” he said.

“It’s an emotional thing pulling up to a water point and seeing a calf that’s torn to shreds, mostly the animal will still be alive.

“When you’re seeing animals in that distress you’re not thinking about the bottom line, we are animal lovers and we want to look after our stock.”

“There’d be 4,000 or 5,000 calves born on Bidgemia each year and if we find one or two or three that have got dog tracks on them, bites, cuts, bruises, that would be about where we want it.

“If you let the dingo problem just run rife, I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say that 5 to 15 per cent of your calves would be knocked around by dogs year on year, so it makes an enormous difference to the business.

“And if you’re an animal lover and you love your cattle, you just don’t want to see your animals torn to shreds by wild dogs.”

He does not agree with the idea that dingoes will self regulate their numbers.

Bidgemia Station sits within the boundary of the Carnarvon Rangelands Biosecurity Association, a landholder group that covers a swathe of land from Exmouth to Shark Bay to nearly Meekatharra.

Group chair Ross Collins says the association employs seven doggers who kill between 700 and 1,000 dogs per year.

“You’ve got to find a happy medium with everything; you get too many dogs and that’s where the problem starts,” he says.

“For the people that tell me that they regulate their own numbers, it’s like anything, if they’ve got food and water, they’ll keep breeding.

“The ecology certainly needs dingoes, but it’s like everything else; us as humans, as we manipulate the environment, it’s our responsibility if something gets out of whack, we need to mitigate it.”

Ross Collins says doggers kill more than 700 a year, while trail cams help detect how many dingoes are roaming around.

ABC: Chris Lewis

Tracey Kreplins says there are large parts of WA where no wild dog control occurs, but wild dogs are resource-dependent.

“Wild dogs are not spread evenly across the landscape, they’re opportunistic predators,” she says.

“We have spread the range of wild dogs across the state because we have put resources [livestock] out there, we’ve put water points out there, and we’ve therefore extended their ability to have higher numbers in places.

“It’s the most emotive species that I’ve ever worked on and there’s so many polarising discussions, ideas and ways to manage the land; it’s a really interesting and challenging species to work on for sure.” 

Landholders are given a range of management tools for wild dogs by government — some lethal, and others are used to deter dogs such as noise-emitting howlers and squawkers on vermin-proof fences.

Sheep and dingoes cannot coexist 

By the 2000s, the Murchison region was one of the last pastoral areas with sheep, and dingoes began to appear in the landscape and attack livestock.

Rossco Foulkes-Taylor is a third-generation pastoralist. For 80 years his family grazed sheep on Yuin Station.

He can remember as a child travelling north into the Pilbara and inland near Meekatharra to assist pastoralists prepare wild dog baits.

“[Then] we were 250 to 300km from the dog problem,” he says.

But the dogs eventually arrived.

“We knocked off the first couple in 2002 … I’d say 2010 was when it became unmanageable — you put out your several hundred ewes and you get 30 per cent less [back] and you’d get about five lambs,” Rossco says.

“We had a couple of those experiences, that’s unsustainable.”

Yuin once shore 18,000 sheep. Today, the Foulkes-Taylors have 500, kept behind a $600,000 dog-resistant fence.

Most of the family’s income is from businesses outside the station.

Many stations within the Murchison have transitioned to cattle, but Rossco does not think this is a suitable option for the vegetation at Yuin.

“I’m not preaching to others, but I can do some sums on the back of an envelope in about 50 seconds to tell you why sheep will return better than cattle in this country, in this southern rangelands shrublands, not the grasslands of other parts.

“And sheep also get a very bad rap about what they do to the country and [people say] cattle are the answer because they don’t hurt the country as much as sheep and so on. 

“Bullshit. Bullshit. Animals don’t hurt the country so much as the managers who have too many of them or don’t manage them properly.”

David Pollock concedes sheep and dingoes cannot coexist.

He runs a small mob of cattle on Wooleen where he fattens skinny animals and on-sells them, and says dingoes do not bother his stock. 

Tourism is a key income generator for the property.

Dividing fences

A 1,200-kilometre vermin-proof fence stretches from Kalbarri to Ravensthorpe, roughly dividing Western Australia’s pastoral and grain growing land. 

It was built in the early 1900s but significant upgrades to a wild-dog standard began in 2010.

Chris Patmore grazes sheep west of the fence, but seven years ago dingoes appeared on farmland near Perenjori and began attacking his stock. 

They had found a path through the fence.

“It’s not an exclusion fence, it’s a barrier fence, but it stops a lot of most of those dogs that are coming in from the pastoral areas; our main aim is to protect the entire south-west land division that have a lot of sheep,” Chris says.

He chairs the Central Wheatbelt Biosecurity Association, one of the 14 producer-led biosecurity groups in WA designed to help landholders meet their requirements to control weeds and declared pests, like wild dogs, on their land.

The group, and others within the farmland area, formed when farmers began finding their stock attacked by dogs.

“We were up around 500 stock deaths per year prior to the setting up of the group,” Chris says.

A coordinated baiting and trapping effort by landholders, along with employing doggers — people specifically tasked with killing wild dogs — saw stock attacks drop dramatically.

Last year the group was prevented from controlling dogs for three months in land owned by government, Indigenous and private interest groups for conservation.

Chris says the result was a significant increase in stock attacks.

“We need ongoing access to all the land within our area. In fact, every landowner, whether a government department or anybody, is beholden to the Biosecurity Agricultural Management Act.

“And that means because wild dogs are a declared pest in WA, everyone that has control over any land must do a concerted control effort.”

Chris says biosecurity groups like his are the “final frontier” to wild dogs moving south, and that the state has to make a stark choice between dingoes and a sheep industry.

“There’s also a human safety element too. If they get into the more populated areas, it’s probably only a matter of time and a small child will get taken or people will be harassed by dogs. 

“We’ve seen instances of that in the mining companies in the Pilbara already.”

Stalked on a daily walk

Yalgoo pastoralist Trish Grinham has spent most of her life in the bush. She walks six kilometres every day as part of her recovery from a broken leg.

She was walking through her horse paddock with her two pet dogs when a wild dog approached, growling with its hackles raised. It came within about five metres of her.

“I just quietly turned around, tried not to panic and started slowly walking for home but it kept following,” she says.

The dog approached several times, coming within a few metres as Trish tried to get home until her horse appeared, striking out at the wild dog with its hooves.

“I was packing myself; it wasn’t a nice feeling and I haven’t walked in [the horse] paddock since.

“It was very surprising, I don’t know if it was because of my two dogs if it was more interested in having a go at them.

“I do think it’s only a matter of time until someone is attacked. We’ve always been told dingoes are shy, but this dog was not shy.”

After also running about 18,000 sheep, Trish and her husband Bob switched to grazing cattle in 2019 due to wild dog attacks.

Despite their best efforts to protect them, the few sheep they have left are still being attacked by dogs.

“Things are changing in the bush unfortunately,” Trish says.

The debate over the presence of an apex predator in farming regions for now looks likely to remain a complex and divisive issue, with no clear path for the balance between conserving a native animal and sustainable protein production.

Credits

• Reporting: Joanna Prendergast and Chris Lewis
• Video and photography: Chris Lewis
• Digital production: Daniel Franklin