Our Wild Dingoes...

Our wild dingoes live all across Australia, in grasslands, deserts, forests and even wet lands. "A dingo is a distinctive animal in Australia, identifiable by its erect ears, bushy tail, and neck that can arc backward into prime howling position". Still, it's difficult to tell a dingo from a dingo-dog hybrid, or even a feral dog, because natural variation within dingoes is poorly understood and mating with wild dogs may have altered the genome of living dingoes. Being able to define what a dingo is—and isn’t—is increasingly important in Australia. While some scientists argue that dingoes with no dog DNA fill the important niche of apex predator in Australia’s ecosystem by eating feral cats and foxes, farmers lump dingoes, feral dogs, and dingo-dog hybrids into the category of pests that attack and kill valuable livestock. Current policies in some jurisdictions of Australia aim to exterminate dingo-dog hybrids while conserving dingoes. But without a clear definition of what distinguishes a dingo, it’s hard to manage wild dingoes, dingo-dog hybrids, and free-roaming domestic dogs. There is still much work to do in developing clear guidelines for identifying dingoes in the wild. If it looks like a dingo and acts like a dingo, is that enough to count it as a dingo? ~Gary Taylor Photography~