The dingo pack linked to the death of Canadian tourist Piper James on Australian island K’gari will be destroyed, the Queensland government has announced.
Environment minister Andrew Powell said on Sunday that an entire pack of 10 animals would be euthanised.
The group were linked to the death of Piper James, 19, on Monday. An autopsy released on Friday found physical evidence consistent with drowning and injuries consistent with dingo bites, but “pre-mortem dingo bite marks” were “not likely to have caused immediate death”.
The island, about 380 kilometres north of the Queensland capital, Brisbane, is home to an estimated 200 dingoes, which are sacred to the Indigenous Butchulla people, who call them wongari, and are specifically mentioned in K’gari’s world heritage listing. K’gari was previously known as Fraser Island.
“This tragedy has deeply affected Queenslanders and touched the hearts of people around the world,” Powell said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the department said rangers had spent the week closely monitoring the pack of dingoes involved in the incident and observed aggressive behaviour. They were deemed an “unacceptable public safety risk”.
Powell said the dingoes would be “removed and humanely euthanised”.
“This is a tough decision but I believe it’s the right call in the public interest,” Powell said.
The Butchulla Aboriginal Corporation secretary, Christine Royan, described the decision as a “cull”.
K’gari is a national park and owned through native title. The Butchulla people co-manage the island in collaboration with the state government.
Six animals were destroyed on Saturday, but Royan said the traditional owners of the island hadn’t been consulted on the decision or even told about it until Sunday, in spite of the island’s management plan.
“I was dumbfounded,” she said.
“This government has no respect for First Nations people. It’s a disgrace”.
Dingo attacks have become common in recent years, but deadly incidents are rare.
Baby Azaria Chamberlain was killed by a dingo near Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, in 1980. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, was falsely prosecuted for her death, as depicted in the film a Cry in the Dark.
In 2001 a K’gari dingo killed 9-year-old Clinton Gage, sparking a controversial cull of the animals. About 30 animals were destroyed in a move labelled “illogical” by the federal government and opposed by conservationists.
The state government has since established a range of other measures to protect people from the animals, such as fencing and warning signs, but individual animals are occasionally destroyed.
The Butchulla and conservationists have long blamed over tourism for attacks on the island.
K’gari’s world heritage advisory committee warned last February that the island’s ecology risks being “destroyed” by “overtourism”. But Powell has consistently rejected proposals that would cap visitation.
Central Queensland University senior lecturer Bradley Smith said the decision was irrational and would have a “devastating” effect on the population’s ecology, which he said is on track for extinction in 50 to 100 years.
“Every time you remove an individual, and particularly a whole family, then you’re removing all their whole genetics from their already limited population. So it’s just an absolute disaster for the dingo population,” he said.
Smith said reducing genetic variation would leave the animals more vulnerable to disease and inbreeding. He said it would have no effect on safety.
“Unless you fix the way that humans behave on the island towards dingos, then it will never fix it,” he said.
“So this (dingo attacks) will happen again”.
