There is a furphy that is steadily taking over from the facts on protecting Australia’s dingo, accentuated by those of the community who raise themselves up as saviour to mankind, the non-eco friendly farmer (NEFF). In the farming community, the word dingo has been dropped from their vocabulary, to be replaced with the term “Wild Dog”. Using these words tends to demonise the dingo as being a wild savage beast that needs to be exterminated before they take over and devoid the environment of every living creature.
In the same breath these NEFF say they are allegedly protecting the pure dingo by terminating hybrid canines, for this is the real cause for the dingo’s demise. These people who have managed our land to a point of collapse (erosion, salinity, de-forestation, etc.) now believe they are expert taxonomists and tell us what a dingo is.
They think a dingo is a DNA snapshot of a species with a genotype or phenotype fixed forever, never to change and anything outside this is considered not genetically pure therefore an abomination to be purged from the environment.
The old saying “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... it’s a duck”, this is also true for other creatures. If a canine looks like a dingo, howls like a dingo and fills an ecological niche like a dingo then it must be a dingo, even if it contains genes from other members of its own Genus.
All members of the Genus Canis are inter-fertile; this means that they can produce fertile off-spring with no dysgenesis. In other words all Canis species should be treated as one species with many sub-species, no matter whether it is a wolf, domestic dog or a dingo (1) .
The definition given by Henderson’s Dictionary of Biology (2008) for species and sub-species is,
Species: in sexually reproducing organisms, a group of interbreeding individuals not normally able to interbreed with other such groups. Species can be sub divided into sub-species, geographic races and varieties.
Subspecies: taxonomic term usually meaning a group consisting of individuals within a species having certain distinguishing characteristics separating them from other members of the species.
Interestingly, if the definition for species is taken literarily, does this mean the dingo like canine on Fraser Island are a separate species, due to the fact that they cannot interbreed (island effect)with other such groups? If this is indeed fact why does the Queensland Government aid in their destruction, instead of allowing them the right to survive on that fragile sand island? One could argue, is the pure dingo of today the same creature as it was when the NEFFs first set foot upon this land. It is plausible to say that the dingo of today has evolved into what we see due to over two hundred years of culling by humans.
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Which one is a hybrid? |
The role of the dingo in the trophic network as a keystone species holds the environment in balance. When the dingoes’ numbers are reduced by anthropogenic control methods, such as baiting with 1080 poison, a cascade affect is seen by the flux of herbivores predating on the foliage to a point of starvation. An example of this happened in May, 2008 on a Department of Defence site in Belconnen, a suburb of Australia’s capital where 400 eastern grey kangaroos were culled due to numbers harming the native grassland’s threatened species. The kangaroo numbers grew due to the lack of control by its apex predator, the dingo, which is regionally extinct in Belconnen.
There is an argument that the role of the dingo could also be performed by another subspecies of the Canis genus, in the case in Australia it would be a canine with a common ancestor of a dingo. It is to be remembered that a species is never constant, it is always adapting to its environment due to evolution or if it doesn’t adapt they are banished to the realm of extinction. This is how the evolution works, so for the dingo to adapt to changing conditions in Australia, it might need to breed with other canids to survive due to the pressure that is exerted by the unending anthropogenic controls by the NEFFs.
So this message goes out to the people who make the decisions and laws: the first thing is to look at the role of the canine in the environment before looking at the makeup of the canine's genome when they are about to decide the future of Australia’s unique environment in the interest of conservation and biodiversity.
Reference:
- Coppinger, R., L. Spector, and L. Miller. 2009. What, if anything, is a Wolf?
In The World of Wolves: New Perspectives on Ecology, Behaviour and Management,
edited by M. Musiani, L. Boitani and P. Paquet. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press.
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