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It's a debate that's raged on "since colonisation" — are they dingoes or wild dogs?
Readers are advised this story contains an image some people may find distressing.
Right across Australia, especially in sheep country, there's been a coordinated effort to control the dogs that pose a fatal risk to livestock.
For hundreds of years, dingoes and wild dogs have been baited or shot by landholders and local and state governments.
Now, new research looking at the genetic breakdown of 400 dingoes across Australia has confirmed majority of the wild dogs are, in fact, dingoes.
More accurate DNA testing
University of New South Wales conservation geneticist Kylie Cairns has been studying dingoes for more than a decade.
She said she grew frustrated by the outdated method of DNA testing, developed in 1999, and decided to conduct her own studies using a newer method.
"We used a method where we can look at 195,000 different DNA sites along the genome," Dr Cairns said.
"The previous research looked at only 23 DNA sites.
"So it's a dramatic improvement in terms of the amount of information you're getting for each animal."
Dr Cairns and her research colleagues performed genetic ancestry tests on samples they collected from 307 wild dingoes, 84 captive dingoes and 152 domestic dogs around Australia.
In NSW, where dingoes aren't protected, and Queensland, where they are protected in national parks, it was commonly believed most of the population were "wild dogs".
Dr Cairns' research found only two of the 171 samples from those states had less than 70 per cent dingo ancestry, and most of the animals sampled in those states were "pure dingoes or historical dingo backcrosses".
In Victoria, where dingoes are only protected in national parks, the DNA analysis found up to 88 per cent of samples from that state came from pure dingoes.
Dr Cairns said it had previously been thought there were no pure dingoes remaining in Victoria.
Dingoes part of country
Jirrbal woman Sonya Takau, the founder of dingo advocacy platform Dingo Culture, said the dingo was not only a cultural keystone species, but kin to Indigenous cultures across Australia.
She grew up surrounded by dingo pups, and remembers being told the dingo creation story as a child.
The story goes that the dingoes around Tully in north Queensland chased the kangaroos out of the area, forcing them south and west.
But as the dingoes chased the kangaroos, they grew tired and stopped to rest.
As they sat down, they turned to stone and rock, and one dingo — called Gudamy — stopped to rest on Mount Mackay near Tully, which is now its eternal resting place.
To Ms Takau, the dingoes are part of country, and they need to be protected.
"This dingo debate [has] been happening in this country since colonisation," she said.
"They're an animal that plays an important part, an ecological role, in the bush.
"They're needed. There's no doubt about that and we've always known that as Aboriginal people."
Dingoes and sheep 'not compatible'
Dingoes are estimated to cost upwards of $89 million every year in lost agricultural production and management costs, based on a 2016 study.
Sheep producer and president of AgForce Queensland's sheep, wool and goat board Stephen Tully knows first-hand the impact of dingoes on small livestock.
"Our lowest lambing was 20 lambs," Mr Tully said.
"That's not 20 per cent, that is 20 lambs on the entire place. Last year we marked 3,500 at 95 per cent.
"That's the difference they make. The two [sheep and dingoes] are not compatible."
Mr Tully said many farmers spent millions of dollars building exclusion fences to protect their flocks from dingo predation.
He said the success of the fences had enabled Queensland's sheep and wool sectors to bounce back after dingoes and droughts forced farmers out of the industry.
"They [dingoes] were destroying regional economies and towns were on a death spiral," he said.
"The exclusion fencing was the start [of the recovery].
"Since then we've seen towns thrive, we've seen the sheep industry in Queensland go from two million sheep to three million sheep in the last two or three years."
'No wild dogs in the bush'
Dingoes are listed as vulnerable to extinction under the International Union of Nature Conservation's Red List of Threatened Species.
Armed with new data, Dr Cairns said there needed to be a shift in how governments and most of the Australian population viewed dingoes.
"This research is telling us there's no wild dogs in the bush," she said.
"The government [needs] to embrace the word dingo, because the word 'wild dog' is misunderstood.
"We need to shift and better balance the way we're managing them.
"Calling them dingoes, like they are, will help to have a more balanced approach to discussing how we're conserving and managing them in Australia."
Despite a belief that dingo populations should be conserved, Dr Cairns said there was a place for population management where dingoes threatened livestock like sheep.
She wanted to see more protections for dingoes in national parks — but said landholders also needed to be able to manage them.
"That might mean something like reducing the amount of aerial baiting across national parks and conservation areas," she said.
"But moving that financial support into investing into agricultural practices, for example, giving farmers subsidies to put up better fencing, or to train livestock guardian dogs, or to engage trappers or shooters that are going to target specific dingoes that are causing issues for farmers."
Ms Takau said the legislation needed to work for more than just the agricultural industry.
"It comes down to making sure we're doing the research, that we're taking all perspectives into consideration," she said.
"I think the question to society and to the livestock industry is ... are we willing to change the way we think about this animal?
"This research really raises a big question to government, and the term wild dog that sits across legislation."
More testing needed
Dr Cairns said the government needed to update its DNA testing method to get a better grasp of Australia's actual dingo numbers, starting with more detailed population surveys.
She said researchers only had a very rough idea of how many were being killed through baiting or shooting programs across the country.
"We don't actually know how many dingoes there are in the landscape at the moment," Dr Cairns said.
"Before we can talk about how we should be managing the impacts and making sure that we're conserving them, we need to carry out more detailed genetic surveys.
"This project looked at only about 400 samples, so we need to apply this updated genetic method to much larger numbers of samples to make sure that we're basing conservation and management policy on up-to-date information."
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