It would work for me also. The problem, though, is such signs apparently don’t work for the stupid amongst the tourists. Heck, out here on the Monterey Bay, we’ve signs telling folks that the waves can and will knock you off the damn rocks and kill you.
Yes, people still stand next to the damn signs! People still stand on the damn rocks! People still get swept into the ocean! And, yes, they still die.
Think of it as culling the (human) herd.
Well, not immediately. The immediate strategy announced by Peter Beattie involves commencing culling after a risk assessment report has been completed. At this stage the cull is anticipated to include up to 200 dingoes and exclude only those located on uninhabitable parts of the island. The risk assessment report may well recommend that those dingoes should also be culled.
I’m providing a couple of links here to very different viewpoints on the issue. This commentary by FIDO on the draft dingo management plan takes the extreme conservationist viewpoint. It’s quite a long document, but despite its evangelical tone, it makes a great many valid observations and quite a few useful suggestions on how the draft management plan could be improved.
Perhaps, not surpisingly, the vast majority of The News Corporation’s coverage of this issue leans towards the “killer dingo menace” side of the debate.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage, here and here is probably a little less emotive than the others.
I haven’t yet had a chance to find links to today’s visual media coverage, but will do so as the day goes on.
As I see it, there are some key issues which will come into focus in the coming weeks including [ul]
[li]the failure of the Queensland government to implement the 2 year old draft dingo management plan[/li][li]the failure of the authorities on Fraser Island to effectively deter human/dingo interaction by enforcing existing penalties[/li][li]the question of whether it should be an offence to come within a cetain distance of dingoes as it already is in respect of whales and dolphins[/li][li]the impact that a dingo cull would have on the eco-system of Fraser Island (domestic dogs have been banned from the island for many years)[/li][li]the relative balance which should be maintained in World Heritage listed areas between protecting and preserving the uniqueness of the environment, and economic considerations such as tourism (applies equally to Kakadu and Uluru as it does to Fraser Island)[/ul][/li]
This is not a simple issue, it’s an extremely complex one and it has long-term implications both for Fraser Island and for other World Heritage listed tourist destinations. Any proposed culling or relocation programme will needs to be evaluated in terms of its impact on the purity of the dingo gene pool. There aren’t any simple options which address all of the issues, and there are unlikely to be in the short term.
Would signs saying “a child was killed by a dingo here, don’t feed them” work? I doubt it. People still feed the dingoes at Uluru, 20 years after the death of Azaria Chamberlain, and they still feed crocodiles on the Adelaide River near Darwin (don’t get me started on why crocodiles are migrating south).
It seems we humans want the “wilderness” experience with any and all actual danger removed - maybe we should all sign up for “survivor”.
Damn, if I don’t start swearing and stop citing, this is going to end up in GD or IMHO.
Never, ever, underestimate the stupidity of homo sapiens. Just about the time you think you’ve seen it all, here comes another pack of yahoo knuckleheads that show how shallow your observations were.
I concur with the “think of it as the culling of the human race” posted earlier.
I disagree with any culling of the dingo pack; they were just being dingoes. Any crime there?
p.s. Screw P.E.T.A. (People Eating Tasty Animals)!
It’s a pity the online version of
this story in Today’s Daily Telegraph isn’t accompanied by the photo published in the hard copy version.
The image of a ranger aiming a rifle at a dingo sleeping peacefully in the sand only feet in front of him, conveys very powerfully the extent to which dingoes of lost their natural fear of humans.
Unfortunately, the true idiots aren’t usually the ones who pay. Was the tour operator the only one feeding them? Betcha five cents he wasn’t.
On a related note, up here in the Yukon, one of the bigger causes of wildlife-related injuries is…sheep.
Yep. Li’l sheepies.
The Stone sheep come down to the roads for the salt, and collect on the side. Tourists come along, and just gotta feed the adorable little sheep. And since they don’t have fangs and claws, said tourists feel perfectly safe getting out of the vehicle to handfeed the sheep.
Bad idea. Unfortunately, many sheep have become accustomed to this, and crowd around to get their share. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t lose your balance. If you do, you’ll discover that those cute little sheepies have razor-sharp hooves, capable of slashing you to the bone.
Rumor buzzing around town a couple of years ago said we actually lost a tourist to a herd of sheep, but I don’t remember seeing it in the papers.
Idiots.
But they weren’t dingos being dingos. Dingos who havn’t been fed are afraid of people and are not a danger. To me the situation seems similar to one we had here about a year ago. Two dog fighting rings were busted, and the cops confiscated 40 or so dogs (I don’t remember the exact number). They all had to be put down. Was it thier fault that they had been deliberatly bred and then brutalized to make them mean? No, of course not. But they couldn’t be kept safely except possibly by confining each of them to a seperate cage for the rest of thier lives. It was a horrible tragedy, and I don’t think I would have blinked an eye if they had sent the guys responsible to jail for 20 years. But puting the dogs down was the right decision.
In the same way, they will have to either put down the Dingos that have no fear of humans or ban humans form the island. The second article said that about half the population had remains of food from humans in thier feces, so that would be the worst case senario. I would think that the population could recover from that in a few years. However, if the behavior of the tourists dosen’t change (and it won’t unless they start enforcing those fines. People in Yellowstone still sit thier kids on bison to take pictures, despite the explicit diagrams of bison goring people all over the park) then the whole process will have to be repeated every decade or so. The whole situation sucks.
I just woke up to the news that the traditional owners of Fraser Island are seeking a High Court injunction to stop the cull if the Queensland government doesn’t voluntarily cease it by noon.
I agree, Manda, that there will have to be some kind of limited cull. What has made people so angry is the Qld government saying that they would wait until the risk assessment had been done before commencing a cull, and then not doing so.
While there are no reliable figures regarding the total dingo population of the island, figures between 160 and 200 have constantly been used in the media over the last few days. 12 dingoes have already been destroyed, and the current cull is anticipated total 20. More are expected to be culled when the risk assessment report is completed. By anyone’s criteria, that’s a sizeable chunk of the colony.
While the focus is currently on how bigger dingo population the island can sustain, attention needs to be paid to how larger tourist population is can sustain without negative impact as well. Norfolk Island preserves its uniqueness by extreme management in relation to tourists and would-be residents. I’d like to see Fraser Island do the same.