National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program
Incorporated in Victoria No A0051763G
7 Treboryn Crt
Rowville Vic 3178
June 17 2021
Re: A Current Affair 4 June 2021
‘The popular Aussie holiday spot lurking with danger’
The NDPRP has a number of serious concerns about this program, including misleading information, lack of even basic information checks or accuracy, and ethical concerns.
Your program starts by saying a growing dingo population is creating headaches for park rangers on Fraser Island (K’gari).
The population is not growing it is declining. Official figures, once 200, are now estimated pre-fires, as roughly 25 sexually active dingoes. (Ben Allen, personal communication with Karin Kilpatrick of Save Fraser Island dingoes: ‘24.7 (which is basically the number of sexually successful animals contributing to the gene pool in their 175 samples)’)
It must have been distressing for Clinton Gage’s family to be confronted with his image overlaid on the sand dunes where he died.
This was the first fatal dingo attack on Fraser Island ever.
The terminology used throughout the report tends to illicit a negative connotation about the dingoes, for example a majestic but ‘feared’ creature, overlaid with the image of a dingo wearing a collar with two massive boxes hanging from it, a form on monitoring which is inconsistent with the dingoes being able to function and hunt naturally.
In fact, one bitch with a GPS locator lost all her pups, probably because she couldn’t feed them.
More negative language follows (“How to manage these beautiful but ‘potentially dangerous’ animals”. Dingoes are no more potentially dangerous than any other dog their size or larger and have a much better safety record than domestic dogs.
For example, in early June a woman in Maryborough was mauled to death by three domestic dogs. This only made it to page 14 of the local paper, whereas dingo nips are called attacks and always make the front page.
In Australia, two people have been found to have been killed by dingoes in 200 years, in both cases subject to dingo management policies similar to those applying on Fraser Island (K’Gari). Car crashes and drownings are far more common and in the past 20 years, two people have been struck by lightning in the Cooloola Sand Mass region. Dingoes are the least dangerous threat to human safety.
Linda Behrendorff says : “Dingoes are opportunistic top order predators and if an opportunity presents itself, especially with something like a small child, they’ll generally go for it.”
Research by Appleby et al has found the opposite
“… our results also clearly show that dingoes rarely seriously injure even the most vulnerable of people, despite the opportunity to do so arising on occasion. Nor do they regularly seriously injure people more generally.
Children are much more likely to be run over if left unsupervised, considering the eastern beach is a gazetted highway.
Your report shows how organisations manufacture public consent for agendas such as extermination. You should be sophisticated enough to know this is how news is managed and manipulated.
The reporter says: “People have begun feeling sorry for the animals, worrying they look starving and ignoring the golden rule about not feeding any wildlife.”
The expert, Ben Allen, acknowledged public concern but said “we haven’t seen anything that would suggest dingoes are running out of food on Fraser Island.”
Allen is quoted as a wildlife ecology expert from the University of Queensland, but has other unmentioned credentials –
He has links to the Invasive Animals Co-operative Research Centre, which has a clearly stated aim of eliminating wild dogs (including dingoes).
He has also worked extensively with his father (and QPWS adviser) Lee Allen, who had a lot of input into devising the dingo management strategy and has a vested interest in being right. He spent his entire career eradicating dingoes.
Ben Allen also proposed selling dingo meat to China, which created such a storm that people from all around Australia complained to the university where he was about to give that lecture. He attributed this to “cultural differences” which he said he found “fascinating.”
He and his father were also involved in the controversial, cruel and ecologically dangerous Pelorus Island debacle, in which dingoes fitted with time release 1080 poison capsules were released on to the island to kill goats. It was later condemned when these experts were found to have overlooked the danger to a bird species on the island, but they couldn’t terminate the experiment because their tracking collars didn’t work. This is the kind of expertise QPWS relies on and which you believe without question and amplify.
This expert says that the recent catastrophic fires were beneficial for the dingoes, saying “dingoes will change in the moment, they’re not going to stand there and get burned.”
The NDPRP chartered a chopper and flew over the fires which covered half the island – As you can see from the attached photos, no animal could have run away from them.
If they hadn’t been killed by the fire they most certainly would have been killed by the suffocating smoke. We flew very low and could not see any evidence of animals fleeing whatsoever.
The photos also clearly prove that the department lied when it told Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk that the fires had been brought under control two days earlier (Brisbane Times). In fact the department didn’t bring the fires under control at all. It took sudden heavy rain to achieve that.
You can see from the photos the reality of what happened during a period when the QPWS was misleading the Premier and had specifically banned the media from access to the island.
Then Lind Behrendorff says : “Dingoes have evolved to work with fire. They will actually walk along the burning edge and pick anything that comes out.”
Wouldn’t it be a bit hot? A bit smoky? And where is the data?
She goes on to say a dingo is meant to be lean, you are meant to see their ribs.
This is a common fallacy. A vet scientist told the NDPRP, “If you can feel their ribs, that’s ok, but if you can see their ribs, they’re emaciated.”
You say, obviously on QPWS advice, that tracking collars are used to prevent further attacks, but after 10 years of tracking collar use, they still claim there are attacks.
We have called for a ranger presence at high use visitor sites especially during school holidays, which conflict with the dingo breeding cycle.
In cases where the NDPRP or Save Fraser Island Dingoes has placed volunteers at these sites, there were no negative dingo interactions whatsoever.
The truth about tracking collars is they do not record interactions; they just make maps of where the dingoes go.
You showed footage of people feeding dingoes and their faces were blurred to protect their identities. It is claimed the problem for rangers is human interactions are making their job so much harder.
In the footage showing a dingo being fed Cheezels, you can clearly see the shoulder and hips protruding, the belly is concave. The dingo is emaciated.
Few people would have been able to resist feeding such an obviously desperate animal.
Linda Behrendorff says that person has signed the death warrant of that animal.
How?
It is going to die of starvation anyway, before even the QPWS can kill it.
The commentator says we could see this change in behaviour ourselves, as the footage shows a dingo sniffs at a car that stops.
We don’t know if the dingo was trying to get to the water when the car got in its way and just because it sniffs the air doesn’t mean it is looking for food or that it is habituated, or that there has been any change such as you claim to have observed.
Dingoes and many other dog breeds have been chasing cars forever, as well as tractors and horses, as has been seen by scientists such as Arian Wallach and Adam O’Neil in outback Australia
The commentator says the dingo was “wondering if some food would be thrown its way”. Interesting that the commentator knows that the dingo was thinking. – there is the beginning of a very successful circus act in that sort of ESP.
Ben Allen says a fed dingo is a dead dingo.
“It’s either going to be hit by a car, killed by another dingo or die of starvation.” Dingoes are regularly hit by cars and always have hunted on the beach where this happens, as part of their natural territorial patrol. And how does feeding a dingo cause it to die of starvation?
“Misguided activists are another part of the problem.” You then named Jennifer Parkhurst (whose privacy you did not attempt to protect, as you did with others).
Neither did you attempt to contact her for balance or fairness even though this would have been easy (you could have obtained her number via Malcolm Kilpatrick).
This seems to have been deliberate vilification and professionally unethical conduct.
You state that Jennifer “claimed to have been accepted by a pack of dingoes. Taking these incredible up close pictures, but she was later convicted of feeding the animals after being caught on her own videos.”
You have misled the public because the animals you showed during this commentary were not dingoes she had ever fed.
Wouldn’t feeding them actually make her far more likely to be attacked, if Ben Allen is telling the truth?
No footage was shown of starving dingoes which Jennifer had to watch die, even though this was available. It proves Jennifer did not use food to lure dingoes for photos.
After six and a half years of photographing dingos in the wild, including their deaths by starvation (which was not shown by QPWS or you) she was convinced into feeding a small number, by a the person actually shown in the footage you depict.
If you look at the footage again, you will see Jennifer is behind the camera. The person feeding the dingoes was an ex-fiancé who had threatened retribution after Jennifer broke up with him. He later became the QPWS informant, in what amounts to a case of state-sponsored domestic violence.
Domestic violence and related controlling behaviour are things which we believe then Minister Kate Jones generally opposes.
The story shows footage of one of her supposedly tamed dingoes pulling the pony tail of a young girl, then pulling at her T-shirt, causing a non-puncture bruise.
Afterwards the girl said she had received worse from her own dog, in the course of play. If domestic dogs were killed every time they nipped, there wouldn’t be a domestic puppy left alive in Australia.
Jennifer approached the girl’s mother, who had this to say about your program:
“I'm not happy with any of that. I'm especially not happy about them using your footage. I know you never fed the dingoes anything other than what was on the island and was natural. Oh I get so angry at idiots who don't know what they are talking about. If I could sue them for the footage of [my daughter] I would. No one knew the circumstances
The reporter continues: “Parkhurst’s misguided intervention changed this pack’s behaviour so much, eight of them had to be humanely euthanised an awful task dumped on the rangers.”
Firstly, five were killed, not eight. We have every single incident report on file and you are very welcome to come and look at them. They show the dingoes, never aggressive, never bit anyone and did not have to be destroyed at all.
You will see the dingoes were mercilessly hazed every time they appeared on the beach – that is shot at with a clay marble from a slingshot or ratshot from a .22 rifle. This could not be better calculated to drive any dog mad.
These poor rangers you say have this terrible burden have in some cases recorded cause of death as “rifle-itis” or “half ounce of hot lead”, not the words of someone suffering a terrible burden. These dingoes were cruelly stabbed in the heart, to poison them without the ethically required sedation, necropsy reports show.
Far from being humanely euthanised, they were specifically denied anaesthetic prior to being stabbed in the heart by an injection of valobarb, which leading vets have told us is an excruciatingly painful death. They were vengefully killed by a monstrously cruel bureaucracy totally out of control and undisciplined by any adequate ministerial supervision.
We have contacted the producer to ask where the videos taken by Jennifer were obtained. We have received no response. Some of the footage was in the public domain, but the rest was not and had been taken under a search warrant, but not used in court. It is illegal to misuse evidence in this way.
Jennifer still retains copyright on these images, including those not on the internet.
Malcolm Kilpatrick, president of Save Fraser Island Dingoes was approached for a comment, but he was told the story was going to be about the impact of the fires on the dingoes, not about vilifying the dingoes. Malcolm was given approximately 10 seconds of air time. This also is unethical and unbalanced reporting.
Back to Ben Allen, whose final words in the story were : “If we could get everyone to stop feeding them, we would not have a problem.”
But there never was a problem before ideas such as those espoused by the Allens became policy.
The smoking gun of history is that there were no dingo attacks on Fraser Island before the QPWS took over, despite official advice at that time that campers should leave out their scraps to feed the dingoes.
The last genuinely scientific and open inquiry into island activities was conducted by Tony Fitzgerald in the early 1990s. His report made no mention of dingoes at all, for the fairly obvious reason that there were no dingo issues on the island then and there never had been.
We believe Ben Allen was Linda Behrendorff’s PhD supervisor, now her colleague. Few would see her opinions as independent of his and she can be seen as an echo chamber for his views, and vice versa.
And their views, claimed to be “the science” are contradicted by many other scientists.
Reports like this are propaganda, used to manufacture consent for the dingoes’ eventual extermination, something which is already proceeding apace on the island, where you falsely say their numbers are increasing.
Your report seems to be an example of gullible media believing anything on a letterhead.
We believe it is reasonable to require a response within two weeks, so we can decide on what action we are going to take, moving forward.
Honest errors are easily corrected, and I have made many of them in my career as a journalist, but it becomes a lie if you do not try to fix it up.
The other side of this story is a much better one, partly because it would be true.
Arthur Gorrie
Vice President
NDPRP