Word: dingoes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dingo is a dirty word in the Australian vocabulary. As an adjective, it connotes extreme cowardice. As a noun, it refers to a species of wild dog, usually yellow and about the size of a German shepherd, whose bite is worse than its bark.* In the 19th century, before any organized attempts to eradicate the dingoes, they killed about 500,000 sheep a year, making them Australia's public enemy No. 1. As late as the 1920s, Anatomist Frederic Wood-Jones expressed the national attitude toward the killers. "To say anything in favor of the hated wild...
Despite that hatred, some brave Australians are now coming to the defense of the wild dog. "The dingo is a magnificent animal," says Film Maker Lionel Hudson, who praises it for its intelligence and highly developed senses of sight, smell and hearing. Hudson advocates domesticating the dingo and putting it to useful work-tracking down lost people and criminals or sniffing out drugs in baggage. In Victoria, a group is seeking government permission to breed and show the species...
Pyrrhic Victory. Most other Australians still detest the dingo. They have spent about $330 million since the turn of the century to eradicate the animal. They hunt the wild dogs from planes, bait sheep carcasses with poison, pay a bounty of as much as $13 per dingo scalp. They have even built-and maintain-a 5,402-mile-long wire-mesh fence that zigzags across most of the island continent, protecting the nation's 148 million sheep from the predatory dingo. Even so, says Brian Neill, supervisor of the New South Wales Wild Dog Destruction Board...
Australia's war against the dingo has sharply reduced sheep losses-and the population of the wild dog. But further gains may well be a Pyrrhic victory. A still incomplete, decade-long government study has already concluded that the dingo preys heavily on rabbits, wallabies and other grass-eating animals. If the dingo-becomes extinct, the herbivores will proliferate and compete more vigorously with Australia's sheep for pasturage. The result would be a far more serious threat to the sheep than is now posed by the dingoes themselves. Indeed, viewed with an ecologist...
...fact, the dingo cannot bark