dingoes | ConservationBytes.com

Fancy a job in biosecurity controlling pest species?

13 12 2018

Rabbits-Western-NSW

My mate Dr Brad Page — Principal Biosecurity Officer (Pest Animals) at Biosecurity SA — asked me to post the following jobs he’s advertising for pest-animal control. Now, I’m near-completely opposed to ‘wild dog’ (i.e., dingo) control in Australia, but I’ve agreed to post the third position as well, despite my ecological misgivings. Brad has a different perspective.

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We have exciting opportunities for three new pest animal control coordinators, who will be working to support and reinvigorate control of deer, rabbits, and ‘wild dogs’.

All three coordinators will be part of our Biosecurity SA Division within PIRSA. These new positions will report to our Principal Biosecurity Officer, Pest Animals.

Deer and Rabbit Control Coordinators (two positions)

The Deer Control Coordinator and the Rabbit Control Coordinator will provide tailored professional support to natural resource management (NRM) staff and community groups doing control programs. These coordinators will aim to increase the impact of deer and rabbit control programs to support primary producers and biodiversity managers. The position will connect and empower existing community and industry groups, maximising impacts of their efforts to control feral deer and rabbits in agricultural landscapes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, biosecurity, deer, dingoes, employment, feral deer, job advertisement, jobs, pest species, PIRSA, rabbits, state government, wild dogs
Categories : agriculture, alien species, animal welfare, Australia, environmental policy, governance, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, jobs, mammal, management, meso-predator release, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, top-down ecology

What’s in a name? The dingo’s sorry saga

30 01 2015

The more I delve into the science of predator management, the more I realise that the science itself takes a distant back seat to the politics. It would be naïve to think that the management of dingoes in Australia is any more politically charged than elsewhere, but once you start scratching beneath the surface, you quickly realise that there’s something rotten in Dubbo.

My latest contribution to this saga is a co-authored paper led by Dale Nimmo of Deakin University (along with Simon Watson of La Trobe and Dave Forsyth of Arthur Rylah) that came out just the other day. It was a response to a rather dismissive paper by Matt Hayward and Nicky Marlow claiming that all the accumulated evidence demonstrating that dingoes benefit native biodiversity was somehow incorrect.

Their two arguments were that: (1) dingoes don’t eradicate the main culprits of biodiversity decline in Australia (cats & foxes), so they cannot benefit native species; (2) proxy indices of relative dingo abundance are flawed and not related to actual abundance, so all the previous experiments and surveys are wrong.

Some strong accusations, for sure. Unfortunately, they hold no water at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 17 Comments »
Tags: Australia, CRC, dingo, dingo fence, dingoes, dog fence, pest management, poison, predator management, predators, wild dogs, xenophobia
Categories : alien species, Australia, cat, cattle, conservation, dingo, ecosystem function, environmental policy, environmental science, fox, invasive species, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, modelling, predator, propaganda, research, trophic cascades

It’s not all about cats

20 10 2014

If you follow any of the environment news in Australia, you will most certainly have seen a lot about feral cats in the last few weeks. I’ve come across dozens of articles in the last week alone talking about the horrendous toll feral cats have had on Australian wildlife since European arrival. In principle, this is a good thing because finally Australians are groggily waking to the fact that our house moggies and their descendants have royally buggered our biodiversity. As a result, we have the highest mammal extinction rate of any country.

But I argue that the newfound enthusiasm for killing anything feline is being peddled mainly as a distraction from bigger environmental issues and to camouflage the complete incompetence of the current government and their all-out war on the environment.

Call me cynical, but when I read headlines like “Australia aims to end extinction of native wildlife by 2020” and Environment Minister Hunt’s recent speech that he has “… set a goal of ending the loss of mammal species by 2020“, I get more than just a little sick to the stomach.

What a preposterous load of shite. Moreover, what a blatant wool-pulling-over-the-eyes public stunt. Read the rest of this entry »