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Dingo experts have said a decision to kill a 10-strong pack of the animals linked with the death of Canadian tourist Piper James on K’gari could push the island’s population towards extinction while doing little to protect humans.
The Queensland government revealed on Sunday it had already killed six of the pack seen around the body of the 19-year-old in a move that has angered the island’s traditional owners who have said they were not consulted.
On Saturday, James’s mother, Angela, told the ABC that killing the dingoes “is the last thing Piper would want”.
“She wouldn’t want anything done to [the dingoes]; they were there first. She knew that,” she said.
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Todd James, Piper’s father, told AAP on Monday he didn’t think Piper would have supported killing the animals “because of a mistake that she made to put herself in that vulnerable position”.
But he said “for the safety of the island … maybe that pack needed to be euthanised, but not because of Piper, but because of the way they’ve been behaving”.
The Queensland coroner is still to determine the cause of death, but a court spokesperson said a preliminary assessment of the autopsy “found physical evidence consistent with drowning and injuries consistent with dingo bites”.
There were “pre-mortem dingo bite marks” that were not likely to have caused her immediate death, as well as “extensive” postmortem bite marks.
James had gone out early and alone for a swim on 19 January. Her body was found by passersby surrounded by a dingo pack near the Maheno shipwreck.
The tragedy is the latest in a string of incidents involving dingoes and tourists on the World Heritage-listed sand island and the first death since nine-year-old Clinton Gage was killed by two dingoes in 2001. That tragedy saw 32 dingoes culled.
Dr Kylie Cairns, an expert on dingo genetics at the University of New South Wales, said she was “disheartened, disappointed and frustrated” by the government’s decision to kill the pack after the latest death.
“I feel like the scientific evidence on this population [of dingoes] is not being used in the decision making,” she said.
K’gari’s isolated dingo population – likely present for thousands of years – has low genetic diversity and high levels of inbreeding, said Cairns.
With only between 70 and 200 dingoes living on the island, she said “removing 10 is quite significant. That can have a disproportionately large impact”.
“At the moment [the dingoes] seem to be coping with this high level of in-breeding, but when you have a genetically constrained population it does not take much to push them into an extinction vortex.”
She said a lack of genetic diversity meant K’gari’s dingoes were already susceptible to disease. Further reductions could risk pups being born with disfigurement and mothers suffering still births.
“We’re at the point where we could start to see some of these things,” she said.
Killing a pack could see an increase in movement of other dingo family groups that would claim the vacant territory.
“We are punishing animals for doing what wild animals do in a way that likely won’t help people in the future,” she said.
Advisers have previously expressed deep concern that K’gari – the world’s largest sand island, formerly known as Fraser Island – was being damaged by over-tourism. The Crisafulli government has ruled out capping visitor numbers.
Dr Bradley Smith, an expert on interactions and conflict between dingoes and humans at Central Queensland University, said killing the dingo pack was a “kneejerk reaction” and was “dumb management”.
“It gets cheap political points and makes people feel better, but culling never fixes an underlying problem,” he said.
“This is a people problem. You have to fix how people behave. You can’t stop a dingo being a dingo, but you can change how humans behave.”
The Queensland government has said rangers had seen the pack of dingoes involved in further “aggressive behaviour” since the tragedy last week, and the decision to kill them was “informed and in the public interest”.
Smith said male dingoes on the island were now looking to breed and their testosterone levels were elevated, making them behave more aggressively.
“[Rangers] would not see this behaviour [from those dingoes] in a few months time. It is cyclical,” he said.
The Queensland environment minister, Andrew Powell, who is also the tourism minister, has said he backed the advice from park rangers that killing the pack was “appropriate for public safety”.
