Dingo urine may be used as southern hairy-nosed wombat deterrent

Dingo urine could be used on properties in South Australia's Murraylands to prevent wombats from damaging farmland. Southern hairy-nosed wombats are a headache for the region's farmers because they burrow and cause significant damage to agricultural land. Twenty-three permits were handed out to destroy 187 wombats, an endangered species, in the region in 2014. Sarah Lance, from the SA Department of Natural Resources, said wombats were moving onto farmland east of Adelaide looking for food because native grasses were in decline.



She said a number of techniques had been trialled in the area in an effort to relocate wombats to other areas, such as one-way gates and "wombat socks, where they wriggle through so they can get out of a warren but can't re-enter". Similar trials were conducted near Ceduna on the state's west coast, utilising dingo urine and faeces as a wombat deterrent. "They trialled all of these techniques to see if they could, first of all, encourage wombats to leave a warren area and use one-way wombat gates to just make sure that the wombats were gone," she said.

"Then they use deterrents to actually stop the wombats from coming back. What they found after their trials, which took a number of months, was that the dingo urine was the most successful in keeping the wombats away." Ms Lance was unsure whether dingo urine would have the same success in the Murraylands. "Because of the fact that the dingo fence is so far to the north for us in the Murraylands, whereas in Ceduna, the dingo fence is right there, so those wombats may have had some sort of historical interaction with dingoes," she said. Ms Lance said urine was not easy to find and would have to be sourced from overseas.



"We have tried going to our local Cleland Conservation Park dingoes [Adelaide Hills] and asking them to pee in a bottle, but unfortunately that didn't really work," she said. "Then we were very lucky because of the wildlife conflict issues in the United States. We actually found out there was dingo urine available for sale and so we brought our dingo urine in from overseas." Department figures show the population of Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombats in the Murraylands is about 148,000. Concerns have been raised in recent years about the health of the population, after some were found to be starving and poorly nourished. It was blamed on a decline in native grasses, which forced many to eat introduced weed with limited nutrition. Trials of dingo urine are expected to start within the year.