A six-year-old boy has been attacked by a pack of dingoes while on holiday in Australia.
The child was flown to hospital by helicopter and remains in a stable condition following the incident on Fraser island, off the coast of Queensland.
“The family had finished swimming when the young boy said he wanted to race up a sand dune,” said Dan Leggat from the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland Lifeflight rescue.
“Unfortunately, when he got to the top, there was a pack of four dingoes. One of the dingoes attacked the boy and bit him on the leg.”
Local media reported paramedics found the boy with multiple puncture wounds.
Fraser Island, a World Heritage site, is home to one of Australia’s oldest and least-interbred populations of dingoes - native wild dogs which are now a protected species.
Dingoes are thought to be related to an Indonesia dog breed introduced to Australia thousands of years ago.
To protect the genetic purity of the Fraser Island pack, domestic dogs were banned from the island decades ago.
However, the dingoes on the island have occasionally attacked humans in the past – including killing a nine-year-old boy in 2001 – which has led to bouts of culling by the park rangers who run Fraser Island.
Some researchers believe there are as few as 200 dingoes left on the island, which has a permanent human population of 194 but sees hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
Because the Fraser Island dingoes are less wary of humans they are a popular tourist attraction, but the authorities often have to warn visitors not to feed them or allow children to wander off alone nearby.
