Leave our Dingoes alone...

Leave our Dingoes alone... To win the war against the continued impacts of cats, foxes and overabundant herbivore populations, they need to move away from the current costly and interventionist approach, to one that promotes the natural resilience and resistance of ecosystems. This of course is restoring dingoes, their roles in the landscape come largely for free, by simply letting them do what comes naturally! Killing dingoes fractures social structure and behaviours, and leads to increases in mesopredators (foxes and cats) and herbivores (rabbits and kangaroos). Where dingoes are not controlled, they regulate ecosystems, and promote the recovery of biodiversity and productivity. The control of a socially complex species, such as dingoes, can have profound ecological impacts if abundance alone is considered. With dingoes, social stability, rather than abundance, is the strongest predictor of healthy ecosystems. There are less herbivores and mesopredators and more native prey species. therefore, it would depend on the recovery of social stability than a mere increase in predator numbers. Social groups rather than individuals are critical in the nature of predator–prey dynamics, and provide underlying stability of populations and ultimately, ecosystems. In the case of dingoes, a lack of stable territory holding packs can release apex predators to bottom–up processes increasing reproductive rates and immigration, and resulting in populations consisting largely of juveniles. Individual and/or young animals are typically poorer hunters than older, more experienced members of packs, and might be unable to hunt large prey such as kangaroos (and so they might target livestock instead). This explains in part why high dingo numbers may not always best predict positive ecosystem states, and why current approaches to dingo control can in fact exacerbate impacts on livestock.

It's all pretty straight forward really...