Dingo- Australia's Most Controversal Animal

Dingo – Australia’s Most Controversial Animal

The Dingo – wild dog, camp dog, house pet or a vanishing breed.

It fits all categories, and is at the same time Australia’s first feral dog.

Some people love them, some hate them, but everyone has a view of our native dogs.

Graziers vent their spleen on the dingo; politicians fill their too-hard baskets with them; dog lovers carry them as their cross; indigenous people live with them.

That is the story of the dingo – a dog with specific characteristics, a specific history – just like any other dog, except it is our first feral dog and, in its pure state, it is vanishing.

Some people believe there are patches of the pure dingo still in the wild; others more wary, have taken to sustaining the dog’s pure gene pool by breeding up the unique species.

In recent years small dingo breeder groups have sprung up, swapping information, creating a tangled web of inconsistent, but from out of the inconsistencies there emerges a true story.

Years of research have traced the dingo from Thailand to Australian shores and home again. The only clue to its origins was a small species of biting lice (Hexterodoxus spiniger) commonly found on the Australian kangaroo and dingo and carried by generations of the dingo Thailand.

Such a tiny thing to be carrying around so much history on its small, hard shelled back when for decades scientists have debated and haggled over the many theories, trying to pinpoint when the dog first stepped onto Australian shores.

But now, it seems that the first dingoes arrived at least 3500 years ago on Thai trading boats . Carried as a source of food, they set foot for the first time on Australian soil .,

Some escaped, some were traded with the Aborigines,,and some went home to Thailand. And those that did now carried the indigenous Australian parasites in their fur. The lice survived, procreated and prospered – a tiny fragment of Australia in Asia.

At about the same time as this little fellow became famous in the annuals of dingo scientists, a dingo skeleton was found in South Australia adding more pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of migration.

The skeleton dated at 3500 years old, was of an 18-week old dingo pup, putting the dingo’s origins in Australia back further than had been realized.

Its location also threw light on the relationship this migrating dog had with the local tribes –it was pampered and thought of highly as camp dog, hunter, companion, food source and garbage collector.

The unfolding of the dingo’s origins has certainly paid out the bogey dog reputation it has been given over the years since European settlement.

Over the years the myths,which have sprung up around the dingo have been , many – the most famous of recent times, the dingo which took the Chamberlain baby at Ayres Rock which gave rise to our most celebrated murder case – and have set back the cause of the dingo a long way in the minds of many Australians.

But now the image of, the animal, which was used to frighten little children in the bush into being good,Is largely gone. In its place is Australia’s oldest feral dog, an animal which the centuries developed into a pure breed but, sadly a breed which is now on the vergeof extinction.

If karma included dogs, the year 1997 is the year for change, and the dingo it seems is a part of that karma. But the question is, whether it is too late to save the pure-bred dingo.Politicians are now showing signs of looking beyond the myths and recognizing facts- the dingo, a dog which loves to connect with people, Is slowly being removed from the vermin list.

But this process is slow and has to run a race with extinction. It is possible that the dingo will receive recognition of its rightful place in the Australian fauna list only after there is nothing left but its evolutionary progeny – the hybrid.

Australia and Thailand, the only two places in the world which can boast of having pure-bred dingoes in the wild, are both losing their gene pool of pure dingoes.

The blame lies at the feet of civilization. It all began to happen when nature, having run its full course, stumbled and failed to rise to its knees to fight the encroachment of settlement and other breeds of dogs.

In Thailand the dingo’s purity has slipped under the feet of westernization . Over the past 20 years the percentage of hybrids has risen from nil percent to eight percent.

The dingo’s age old habit of hanging around people and villages has opened the gates to fraternization with western-bred dogs.

Australian dingoes are in the same situation. All it takes is for one domestic dog to mate with a pure dingo and you have the hybrid. Hybrids upon hybrids change the ratio of survival of the pure genes. Instead of one mating season per year, you have two. But all is not lost.

Certain dingo breeders are calling for the elimination of the wild dog and the recognition of the pure dingo in captivity as a registered breed and our national breed.

Today the dingo is a dog which must once again rely on humans for its place inour continuing history. If we don’t take on that responsibility, dingoes will soon go the way of the dinosaurs – nothing but illustrations in history books and creatures of myth and legend.