Feral Dogs Threaten Suburban Australia

Australia is one country with a stray dog problem different to most. For a long time feral dogs have been a big problem in rural Australian farming areas causing an estimated $70 million of livestock losses every year. In other countries any problems with dogs and livestock are more likely to involve pets on the loose than the typically more urban street dogs. To me it seems that a big difference between the situation in Australia and most of the other tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world is the link to be people. Most of the world’s unowned dogs still have a close relationship with people and earn their living through either begging or scavenging around human communities and in a great many cases actually still have a direct relationship with some individual people. But in Australia that link has been broken and these feral dogs survive through hunting with absolutely zero social link to people.

This makes the reports of feral dog packs edging into suburban areas different and more worrying than it would be elsewhere. Reports such as this one in The Courier Mail may be exaggerating the threat by claiming that children are at risk but I’m sure they are correct to treat these animals very differently than if they were abandoned pets. In this case in the vast open spaces virtually unoccupied by people with no niche for beggar or scavenger it seems that the dogs have gone feral to the extent of totally undomesticating themselves back to hunters.

Biologically that’s interesting but to suburban Australians it’s worrying.

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)