Canine Rabies will alter how we manage wild dogs in Australia

Abstract

Canine rabies, a fatal viral zoonosis, is now less than 300 kilometres from Australia's mainland and continues to spread eastwards through the Indonesian archipelago. Rabies incursion into Australia will alter our society's perceptions of wild dog management, particularly in peri-urban areas where contact can occur between wild dogs, pets and people. Canine rabies will not only have major implications for Australian pest animal management, but will also impact upon how Australians interact with domestic animals and native wildlife. Fear of infection may increase pressure to kill or tightly control dogs and will likely require land managers to adapt how they manage people and wild dogs in densely populated areas. To respond to this imminent threat, we need to model how rabies will spread through Australian ecosystems so that we can develop effective rabies management plans. This will minimise reaction times and improve our chances of containing outbreaks. Here, we present preliminary data collected to inform rabies management plans. Firstly, we use data from GPS-telemetry collars fitted to domestic and wild dogs, as well as data from camera traps, to provide insight into dog-dog and human-dog contact rates. Secondly, we present and discuss the results from self-administered surveys focussed on dog ownership and dog bites, hunting dog movements and interactions between hunting dogs and wild dogs, all of which are vital to understand, detect and manage canine rabies when it reaches Australia.