Just recently (around May this year) there was a highly visible case of a dingo eating a human child.
The Gage family were on holiday on Fraser Island and when their 9 year old son Clinton didn’t return the dad went looking for him. The dad (Mr Gage) went for a walk with his 7 year old son and found (imagine this, just TERRIBLE) 2 dingoes eating the body of his 9 year old son Clinton.
When he went to shoo the dingoes away they turned on his 7 year old son!
This is from The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/02/pageone/pageone9.html
Ross Gage found his son’s body, ravaged by two dingoes, on Monday morning, then turned around to see a dog attacking his other son, seven-year-old Dylan. Mr Gage kicked the dingo from the bleeding Dylan, only to find the second dog had returned and begun attacking Clinton’s head, the boy’s grandfather, Mr John Gage, told 2UE yesterday.
Ross Gage carried his two sons back to the family tent, shadowed all the while by the pair of dingoes, which were later killed.
How 'bout that huh?
Tourism Australia! Come down under! You might accidentally get killed.
Good one, and next you’ll be telling me that no tourist has ever ended as a bear’s afternoon snack in a US national park.
Anyway, the good news is that it’s been quite a while since we deliberately used the native fauna against tourists. Koalas are now trained to identify Americans so their mituration doesn’t cause an international incident.
BTW G’day bmorey, always good to see another Aussie on the boards. If you are interested in meeting a few of the other Aussies/Kiwis, search out TheLoadedDog’s posts. His sig has a link to the Dopers Downunder page [sub]or you can just drop me a line! Cheers![/sub]
Umm, Australia also has most of the top ten deadliest snakes in the world, around half of the top ten deadliest spiders in the world, and quite a few of the deadliest sea creatures swimming along its shores. If you spend some time doing your homework, those who are injured or killed are tourists, be them from overseas or Aussies on holidays away from familiar surroundings.
All in all, Australia is a much safer place to visit and/or live than the USA.
When I was in Australia, I had the same feeling. Almost no one I spoke with believe the dingos killed the child.
Compounding this are the investigations bungled by the police and the decisions made from those bungles. It was a considerable period of time after the child disappeared that a piece of clothing she was allegedly wearing was found in the desert - in pristine just-out-of-the-box condition, with not a tear or bloodstain at all. There were other strange things, too, but I cannot recall.
My personal take on the entire issue is the child was killed long before the Chamberlains ever established camp. They then created a false scenario of the dingo, stirred up the incident to find the child, knowing the child never was in the campground at all. I don’t recall any witnesses who ever saw the missing child in the campground before the alledged incident. There are witness reports of hearing a crying child before the incident, but none reporting seeing the child.
There is a psychologist’s assessment which may fit here: future behavior can often be predicted by studying past behavior. Study the Chamberlain’s behavior before the incident, as well as after it.
No there wasn’t. There was a highly visible case of a dingo killing a human child, which is a very, very different thing.
The dingoes on Fraser have been attacking people for in excess of twenty years and have absolutely no fear of humans. The unfortunate boy concerned was killed, probably becaus the dingoes percieved him as a threat but there is no evidence that the dingoes tried to eat him.
As for the Chamberlain saga, no one knows and the opinion of the Australian public seems about as divided now as at the time. There has been so much shit talked about the issue that even after twenty years it’s all but impossible to find two sources that agree on what actually happened.
The main undisputed fact that goes towards a suggestion of guilt is that they changed teir stories between the initial police interview and the trial. Hardly conclusive proof though.
The main facts that suggest that a dingo didn’t kill the baby was that the child’s clothing, found the day after the child was taken, contained absolutely no traces of saliva or hair anywhere despite having been apparently stripped from the body by a dog. Some of the clothes (which the defence had suggested could have absorbed most of the saliva) were found neatly folded and apparently laundered and shoved into crack in the rock. It’s popularly reported that the clothes were found buried in a dingo’s lair, but the police report made it clear they were some distance off the ground. Not something the average dog is capable of. Added to this the tears in the clothing are far too clean to have been done with a tooth.
Of course none of this in any way presents evidence that the chambelains were responsible, just that a dingo wasn’t. It should be remembered that aside from the initial enquiry, held when much of the evidence was unknown, every subsequent trial and equiry has returned a verdict that the Chamberlains were guilty or that the death was caused by person or persons unknown. No one has any actual evidence that a dingo was ever involved. One of the biggest mistakes people make is an assumption it was either Lindy or a dingo. When you talk to most people who believe the Chamberlains are guilty it turns out that they just agree with the courts and enquiries that a dingo definitely wasn’t responsible and then make the erroneous assumption it was the Chambelains by defcault. Very few people consider a third party.
But of course given the massive cock-ups involved in the investigation the truth will never be known. Just as a side story one of the more important peices of evidence was the presence of a dark stain on the floor of the Chamberlain’s car. They claimed it was rust proofing and the police suggested it was blood. When the court case rolled around the forensic tets results had vanished along with (IIRC) the stain. The police scientist was forced to concede the tests carried out were inconclusive as to whether the stain was blood. When I was in high school our science teacher thought this was a great joke and one of our lab classes involved being given dried animal blood and dried rust proofing compound on metal trays. We were also issued with some hydrogen peroxide and a protein test from the lab manual. The teacher then asked us to run tests on both substances and asked us if we would be prepared to stand up in court and cofidently declare that one was definitely not blood and the other definitely not rustproofing. Needless to say we were all pretty confident of our results and he proceeded to go on for a bit about how a bunch of fourteen year olds could achieve what the NT police scientists couldn’t. Come to think of it he may have been slightly nuts.
…you’re forgetting the Aboriginal trackers the National Park rangers brought in on the night it happened. They followed dingo tracks from the tent into the sand dunes behind the camping area, including an impression of woven material (a baby blanket?) placed on the sand,then picked up again.
Since the trackers were never called to the inquests or trial, their evidence was never documented or tested.