
dingo Some sheep and cattle breeders have already given up the fight against wild dogs
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Wild dogs are winning the war for habitat in the remote Australian bush. The dogs pass the huge dingo fence that has protected populated areas for the last hundred years, invade pastures and attack farm animals. Some sheep and cattle breeders have already given up the fight against them.
The wild dogs, which are almost impossible to distinguish in the thickets of low bushes, sometimes appear in large herds, and for many ranchers they have become as big a problem as the worst drought in Australia in a century. In some places, attacks by dingoes and hybrid dogs wipe out 20% or more of the sheep flocks.
No one knows the size of the dingo population. It may be millions. "A lot, a lot, a lot. The population has grown to enormous proportions. The concern is that the numbers are only going up," said farmer Robert Fitch, who heads the sheep and wool division of the farmers' organization AgForce. The dingo, a reddish-brown wolf-like dog, appears to have been brought to the fragile Australian ecosystem by migrating Aborigines about 60 years ago. The dingoes reproduce only a few times a year, but hybrid pairings between them and dogs brought by settlers from Europe speed up the reproduction.
Thanks to Australia's famous dingo fence – a wire mesh 180 cm high that stretches for 6,000 km, twice the length of the Great Wall of China – most dingoes remain in uninhabited areas. But even this huge still symbol of Australia's struggle with its wild land is struggling to withstand the pressure of the breeding dogs on either side of it.
The problem has gotten so bad that some ranchers say that there may be a need for a poisoning, trapping and shooting campaign on a scale that would make the fence unnecessary - precisely when its reconstruction work, which lasted for 20 years, is finished.
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Environmentalist - Earth
Michael Byrnes Reuters
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