Kylie Cairns says the results from her comprehensive dingo study surprised both her and her project funders.
The scientist who has turned the debate of wild dogs on its head has spoken of her pragmatic approach to both her research and the options for livestock protection .
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UNSW researcher Kylie Cairns told Country News that she made for extra thoroughness before publishing last year.
“There is a large degree of genetic distance between dingoes and domestic dogs in the analysis,” Dr Cairns said.
“And it took me so long to publish something because I wanted to be sure.”
That surety was needed because Dr Cairns’ conclusion that most wild dogs were in fact dingoes flew in the face of previous studies which suggested that feral domestic dogs had interbred with dingoes to such an extent that it threatened the species’ survival.
A 2015 report relied on methods available at that time, in which 23 genetic markers were used, which could only cover under one third of a dingo’s 78 chromosomes.
Improvements in genetic technology allowed Dr Cairns to use over 195,000 markers, giving a much more comprehensive cover of the species’ genome.
“Generally, more markers equals denser genetic data which equals more robust analysis and therefore can more accurately detect dog ancestry,” Dr Cairns said.
Although the 2015 study had used methods developed in 1999, it persisted in order to accrue almost 8000 samples over several years.
Dr Cairns’ work aligns with recent research undertaken by DEECA which used 4000 markers and 382 dog/dingo samples.
“As my research and the new DEECA research has found, you are misidentifying animals on the old results,” Dr Cairns said.
“If it has 99.99 per cent DNA of a dingo, I call it a dingo and in Victoria I think 87.1 per cent (of dogs sampled) were more than 99.99 per cent dingo.”
Dogs with under 55 per cent dingo DNA are considered hybrids.
No hybrids were found in Victoria, meaning hybridization could no longer be considered the key threat to the species’ survival.
Dr Cairns scoffed at suggestions that conservation funding bodies could influence outcomes of her work.
“When organisations donate money to research, they don’t have control over what comes out,” she said.
“In fact, I said to those organisations ‘we are most likely to find a more pervasive ancestry and you guys are going to need to be ready for that’.”
“Then we found the opposite, and I think it was a shock to me and to the conservation organisations.”
A breakdown of the percentage of dingo DNA used to determine the breed status of 'wild dogs' and the relative abundance of each cross-type in Victoria.
Dr Cairns’ approach to livestock protection is also well founded.
“If you remove a large number (of dingoes) from an area inside their habitat, they will be replaced by others from outside that area.
“So leave the ones that aren’t causing trouble; they will stay there and keep the population at the proper level.”
She hypothesised that baiting within natural habitats could cause hybridization.
“Hybridization can happen if you have a control method that fractures social structures, but only if you have nearby dogs, for example on farms or in peri-urban areas.
“If farmers are having issues, then use targeted control such as shooting for removing the animals that are causing issues and not changing the social structure,” she said.
Country News consulted with an independent geneticist who confirmed the robustness of both studies.
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