ohmidog!

The pure Australian dingo could be extinct within twenty years, and domestic and feral dogs are to blame, an Australian scientist says.

Ricky Spencer of the native and pest animal unit of the University of Western Sydney says only 15 to 20 per cent of all dingoes in southeast Australia and southeast Queensland remain “pure”, with the rest being hybrids.

Speaking at the Ecological Society of Australia’s annual conference in Sydney this week, Spencer said domestic and feral dogs were destroying the native animal, according to a report in The Australian.

“The domestic dogs are actually mixing with the dingoes. I guess you’d call it a form of genetic pollution to some degree (because) they’re originated from European settlement,” he said after the conference.

“In some parts of Australia they are either very close to gone or at least will be in the next twenty years or so,” he added.

Spencer said the problem stemmed largely from people “dumping” pet dogs that they didn’t want, or from farm dogs who got loose and ventured into national parks.

Because dingoes were wild, and domestic dogs were accustomed to humans, there could be “potential problems down the track.”

But he could not say whether the mix could translate into more tragedies like that of Azaria Chamberlain, the nine-week-old girl who was allegedly taken by a dingo from an Uluru camping ground in 1980.

Spencer said the inter-breeding is turning dingoes into larger dogs.

It is believed dingoes first entered Australia about 4000 years ago.

(Photo: Courtesy of National Geographic)