Australia's Wild Heart: The Dingo
- Gregory Andrews
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
#FloraAndFaunaFriday: A national icon with a real ecological job to do
If you’ve never met a Dingo, you need to. The Australian Dingo Foundation introduced me to these two back in 2016, and the memory has never left me. Not because they were “wild” in the movie sense, but because they felt Australian in a way that’s almost impossible to explain: alert, intelligent, confident, self-possessed. There was warmth there too, but not submission. Dingoes don’t do “obedient” the way dogs do.
But here’s the thing Australia keeps getting wrong about dingoes. We talk about them as pests, wild dogs, or a threat to be “managed”. But dingoes are a native animal in Australia, with deep time on this continent and deep roots in culture. They're also an important apex predator. And in ecology, apex predators aren't decorative. They're essential for healthy ecosystems.
A lot of dingo politics in Australia rests on one idea: that “they’re all hybrids anyway”, cross-bred with wild dogs. That line makes lethal control feel easier, and it helps people switch off emotionally. But the genetics story has shifted. Research using ancient DNA shows dingoes established across Australia thousands of years ago, and that modern dingoes have evolved for this continent and share little ancestry with European domestic dogs. A major genetic study (led by Kylie Cairns, Christopher Dickman and Mike Letnic) found hybridisation is much less common than many people assume. Most of Australia's dingo populations are still predominantly "dingo". So yes, cross-breeding can occur. But the lazy conclusion that “there are no real dingoes left” isn't supported by the science.
What dingoes do for Australia
This is where Professor Euan Ritchie and his colleagues have been so important. The short version: when dingoes are present, they suppress or change the behaviour of foxes and feral cats. This benefits smaller native animals. This is the thing about ecology and caring for Country. Predator control isn't just about who eats whom: it is about fear, movement, pressure, and balance across the whole food web.
That doesn’t mean dingoes are saints. Apex predators kill things. That’s their job. But the bigger point is this: removing an apex predator rarely produces a neat, farmer-friendly outcome. It often produces a mess. When you hammer top predators, you can get “mesopredator release”. In Australia, that means foxes and cats surge or become bolder, and biodiversity takes the hit.
Let’s be honest: dingoes kill livestock, and that matters to people on the land. A dead lamb is not an abstract policy debate. But it’s also true that our national story about dingoes has become wildly out of proportion to the actual balance sheet. We tally the visible losses, and ignore the invisible services: suppression of other predators and kangaroo pressure, and the ecological service that we pretend can be replaced by traps, baits, and fences.
Even the way Australia controls dingoes often backfires. Disrupting pack structure by shooting and baiting dingoes changes their behaviour, increasing movement and worsening conflicts. Ecology doesn't reward simplistic solutions.
So the key question I like to pose is not “do dingoes cause harm?”. But "what does Australia lose when we treat a native apex predator as disposable?".
Culture matters: dingoes belong here too
Dingoes are not only ecological. They're cultural. First Nations Aussies developed close relationships with dingoes over thousands of years: they appear in rock art, are folded into kinship systems, have become companions and hunting partners, and are cared for in life and death. In many Aboriginal languages there are even separate words to describe wild dingoes and camp dingoes.
Dingoes sit right inside the Australian psyche. They’re a shared national symbol that shows up in our language, our stories, and iconography. We bake them into everyday slang - a “dingo’s breakfast” is so well-established it’s recorded by Australia’s national dictionary and the Oxford English Dicitonary. We turn them into landmarks too: in Jandowae in Queensland, a “Big Dingo stands in the main street, marking the northern end of the Wild Dog Barrier Fence. And they have long lived in our literature and folklore - Henry Lawson wrote a poem titled The First Dingo. And the Lindy Chamberlain case lodged “a dingo ate my baby” in popular culture at home and abroad, for better and for worse.
That matters because it reminds us of something modern Australia often forgets: our relationship with wildlife isn't meant to be purely utilitarian. “Does it pay rent?” should not be the only question that we ask of our native animals.
My bottom line
Dingoes sit right in the middle of a national tension: while much loved and acknowledged as an Aussie icon, they're also deeply maligned. They can be trouble in sheep paddocks. But they are a gift to whole landscapes.
If we're serious about biodiversity, we can't keep trying to engineer Australia into a continent without apex predators. That experiment has been failing since colonisation.
So this #FloraAndFaunaFriday, I’m backing the dingo: not as a mascot, not as a fairy-tale, but as a native apex predator that belongs in Australia’s living web. And I’m grateful to the Australian Dingo Foundation and scientists like Kylie and Euan for helping me and more Aussies understand dingoes as they really are.
If we want an Australia that still feels like Australia fifty years from now, we need to stop treating dingoes as a problem to erase, and start treating them as a responsibility to look after and manage wisely: with science, with cultural respect, and with a clear-eyed understanding that balance is always harder than blame.
Final note: these dingoes were at the Australian DIngo Foundation's sanctuary with experienced carers. Please don’t approach, touch, or feed wild dingoes. Always give them space and follow local signage and advice.
