But we also cull their natural predators, dingoes.
It makes no sense!
What happens with 1080* poison baiting is there is an impact of social organisation of the dingoes. When you disrupt pack structure you create a dispersal sink. You have young dispersing dingoes from usually pups from the previous year coming into that area and they don't have the pack size or the hunting experience to be able to handle larger prey, and so they are then left with the problem of how to feed themselves.
In other words, if you kill the older more experienced dingoes by poisoning them, a few weeks later when the poisons gone, young inexperienced dingoes can flood into the territory.
It's basically getting a whole bunch of young teenagers together and they just get up to all sorts of strife, and that's when they start chasing calves and sheep and tearing the ears and they get stuck into them.
Protecting dingoes is a powerful panacea for Australia's biodiversity crisis. Dingo sociality is an important factor contributing to top-down regulation potential, it's the pack-not the individual-that's functionally the apex predator.
Relaxation of 1080 control allows dingo populations to recover, leading to population control of mesopredators and generalist herbivores and an increase in small mammals. Sites that have been freed from predator control over an extended period of time continues to improve in the absence of human intervention.
* 1080 is recommended by state governments as the most effective and humane bait for dingoes and wild dogs....Humane? Seriously! Clearly a bullet to the brain is more humane than dying a slow horrible death!!
Information
reproduced with permission from http://jennyleeparker3.wixsite.com/aussie-canis-dingo
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