A 19-year-old woman who had been visiting an Australian island was found dead on a beach, surrounded by dingos, police said. The cause of her death has not been determined.
She was a Canadian who had come with a friend to K’Gari, formerly called Fraser Island, and had been working for about six weeks at a backpackers’ hostel there, Queensland police said at a press conference Monday, Jan. 19.
Around 5 a.m. local time Monday, the woman — whose name was not released — told people she was going for a swim in the ocean, police said.
About an hour later, two men driving past spotted a pack of about 10 dingoes at Maheno Beach and discovered the woman’s body.
Police said it is too early to know if the death was caused by the wild dogs, which are protected as a native species in Queensland’s national parks.
The woman’s body has been returned to the mainland and is set for autopsy on Wednesday.
The great majority of recent dingo attacks on humans have been on K’Gari, home to about 200 of the wild dogs. Most of the victims were children; the most recent confirmed fatal attack was that of a 9-year-old boy in 2001.
Wild dingoes weigh about 30 pounds, and they generally avoid humans.
“I can confirm that the woman’s body had been touched and interfered with by the dingoes,” said Queensland Police Inspector Paul Algie, “but we’re not speculating yet as to whether that was anything to do with her cause of death.”
Algie added that while dingoes are culturally significant to the island’s locals and Indigenous people, “they’re wild animals and they need to be treated as such.”
“I implore all people that visit K’Gari, which is a beautiful place, that you do not go near dingoes, that you do not feed dingoes, and that you just leave them to live their life and you move around them accordingly.”
The 60-mile-long island is separated by a narrow strait from Australia’s eastern coast near the city of Maryborough. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
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