The National Wild Dog Action Plan is Australia’s blueprint strategy for wild dog management that guides state, regional and local plans in accordance with principles of the Australian Pest Animal Strategy 2017-27. It promotes evidence-based, best practice tools and methods aimed at protecting agriculture, the environment and community wellbeing.

Download the Plan

Key principles

1

Coordinated

Plans and control measures are coordinated across neighbouring lands, locales, shires and even states to maximise their effectiveness.

2

Landscape-scale

Wild dogs are highly mobile and can impact livestock across a large area quickly; plans should reflect how they use the landscape.

3

Nil-Tenure

Wild dogs and vertebrate pests don’t obey property boundaries or state borders so we have to work together to control them and limit their impacts.

What the Plan does

  • Promotes national consistency and strategies to conduct safe, efficient and humane best practice wild dog management.
  • Provides national direction for wild dog policy development at the state and regional levels that support ongoing wild dog management.
  • Promotes industry and government cooperation, collaboration and investment to manage wild dogs and reduce their impacts on primary production, native wildlife and people.
  • Directs on-ground research to improve the effectiveness and humaneness of wild dog management techniques.
  • Delivers nationwide extension and capacity building programs to promote education and adoption of best practice principles.
  • Informs and advises governments, peak livestock industry councils, wildlife protection groups and other stakeholders on wild dog management issues.
  • Safeguards a coordinated, collaborative, community-driven approach to wild dog control focused on minimising negative impacts on livestock and biodiversity.
  • While it informs and guides best practice wild dog management, it is not directly involved in control programs.

The NWDAP is a livestock industry-driven initiative funded and supported by its stakeholders and partners.

The Plan's progress

The first NWDAP was implemented from 2014-2019. It resulted in greatly reduced wild dog attacks on livestock, improved productivity and increased employment with flow-on effects to regional towns and economies.

It also played a valuable role in biodiversity protection by supporting the conservation efforts for a range of native species such as koalas, bridled nail-tail wallabies and quolls. Other achievements since its inception include:

  • Improved leadership and capacity.
  • Increased government and industry confidence.
  • Overseen the adoption of NWDAP-aligned, best practice wild dog management plans in all mainland states and territories.
  • Increased leverage and investment for wild dog management at all levels throughout Australia.
  • Successfully generated public and government support for the continued use of current and newly registered control measures.
  • Increased access to a broad range of up-to-date, extension materials.
  • Developed the national training qualification, Certificate III Rural Pest Management.

The current NWDAP 2020-2030 aims to continue building on the achievements of the previous NWDAP.

NWDAP review

In 2019, the NWDAP’s performance was thoroughly and independently assessed by the AgTrans Review.

It found that during the first five years of the Plan (2014-19) it had achieved, or partially achieved, 94% of its action implementation requirements. Learn more about what the NWDAP has done for Australia’s land managers.

Download the review here.