External link: Dingoes touted as wildlife's saviour

A wildlife expert has championed the return of dingoes, our much maligned native dog, as the solution to protecting our native fauna (from the hands of feral animals). The sheep grazing areas in our State's South West have been earmarked amongst locations nationwide that could benefit from the approach.

In a range of papers to be presented this week at the Biodiversity Extinction Crisis Conference in Sydney, Dickman and his colleagues argue the dingo is critical to saving threatened native species and restoring biodiversity in areas that have been devastated by drought and sheep farming.

Dickman says Australia has the world's highest rate of mammal extinction with 27 species and sub-species lost since European settlement in 1788, "which is as much as the rest of the world combined in the same period".

The ecologist has another Australian icon in his sights, suggesting it is time to debate the future of the dingo fence, which stretches 5400 kilometres across the continent from Western Australia to Queensland.

The dingo fence is a "disaster from a biological point of view", Dickman says because of the increase in fox and cat numbers and decrease in small mammal numbers in areas where the dingoes are locked out of.

But he concedes it "won't come down any time soon".