Australia is a land of dangerous creatures. Almost every year somebody is attacked by a crocodile or shark, the bodies of an unfortunate few never to be recovered, having been used to fuel the metabolism of a great predator. Although the chances of such a thing happening are small, the horrific possibility is never far from the minds of Aussies enjoying the beach or those in Australia's tropical north.

Things have not always been this way; before the 1970s attacks by crocodiles and large sharks were rare. As predator numbers increased, a spate of attacks caught Australians by surprise, and deaths occurred before precautions were taken. But there was one predator whose dangers were until recently overlooked. Dingoes are Australia's largest warm-blooded predator. They are also highly intelligent and great opportunists, and the tourist boom has carried thousands of people naive of their ways deep into their territory.

When nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain vanished at Uluru on 17 August 1980, Australians should have taken more seriously the possibility that dingoes were responsible. Tragically, such was our naivety of the danger they represent back then that a media firestorm, the likes of which the country had never known, pushed people towards the wrong conclusions. Many of us were only too prepared to believe that Azaria was a victim of infanticide.

At the time of the first two coronial inquests I was a doctoral student in the biology department of a major Australian university, and my biases were such that I accepted Lindy Chamberlain's guilt uncritically. Her religion was one factor. The Chamberlains were Seventh-day Adventists and media reports of the strange practices of their "cult" (as we were led to think of it) included inferences of child sacrifice that did not strike me as beyond belief. At the time I was one of many Australian scientists fighting to keep creationism out of the classroom, and fundamentalist beliefs were seen as the enemy.

But even more significant, I think, was Lindy's assertion that a dingo had taken her baby. Dingoes were introduced to Australia from southeast Asia around 4,000 years ago, and most Australians thought of them as part of the continent's native fauna. Biologists feared that they would face widespread persecution if the coroner found them to be the cause of Azaria's death.

I have long been deeply regretful of the way I leaped to judgment of the Chamberlains. I should have known better – both about the behaviour of large carnivores and the dangers of the media frenzy. Dingoes are as intelligent as they are versatile, and their response to people is determined by our behaviour towards them. If we teach them that we're a source of food, they will hang around campsites and scavenge what they can. And of course they don't discriminate between a leftover meal and a baby.

The dingo colony on Frazer Island, off south-east Queensland, reveals just what can happen when naive tourists enter dingo territory. The rainforest-covered island, with its superb fishing, has become ever more popular with campers, some of whom found the dingoes so appealing that they started to feed them with food scraps. Consequently between 1996 and 2001 there were 39 major attacks on humans by dingoes on Frazer Island, one of which resulted in the death of a boy aged nine.

At the time of Azaria's disappearance these events were far in the future. Australia's saltwater crocodiles were just beginning to recover from the brink of extinction, and attacks by great white sharks were rarer, perhaps because whales and seals were not so plentiful. And of course dingoes were not widely perceived as a threat, despite the fact that suspected attacks on people date back 80 years, and dingoes are powerful enough to bring down a calf.

Some argue that Australia's large predators, including the dingo, should be greatly reduced in number or exterminated. Yet top predators are vital for ecosystem health. Where dingoes have been eliminated, foxes and feral cats abound, and the damage they do to native marsupials, birds and reptiles is truly monumental. Cats alone account for millions of native animals each year.

Rather than focusing on culling predators, we have other options. As the large marine predators have returned, Australians have adapted. Government programmes now warn people of the dangers of swimming in or camping beside crocodile habitat, and the number of crocodile attacks has been reduced dramatically. Until recently Australians believed that they could control nature. Now we know that we have to live with it. The recent realisation of how dangerous dingoes can be, especially to children, means that Australians – as well as visitors from abroad – will need to adjust their behaviour accordingly.

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