#dingo phenotype

(Let’s get one thing out of the way … I really do not support captive breeding of dingoes for financial reasons, “conservation” or love of the species.)

These dingoes are wild born in Queensland, and are absolutely typical of forest or coastline types. The top two images are of dingoes being legally bred in Queensland at a ‘Sanctuary’. In order for them to be bred, these animals have to be DNA tested to have no domestic dog ancestry, and meet all dingo phenotype characteristics. The following two are of sable dingoes living entirely wild on K’gari, where the Island has kept the population isolated from domestic dogs and these animals have long been labelled the “purest” population of dingoes in Australia.

The next two images are rescue dingoes in captivity, one who has been adopted into a family by a rescue group and the sibling dingoes in the next photo are in sanctuary. This sanctuary, like most ‘sanctuaries’ will only accept ‘pure’, undesexed dingoes in order to breed from them. 

I have a link to the source of this photo, but I’m hesitant to put it up, because of the people who have her. This girl is one of the most beautiful dingoes I’ve ever seen, she’s wild born, and a rescue. She's the type the majority of people would call a dingo cross, or a wild dog. Thankfully she is in a safe place, with a rescue who prioritise DNA testing, probably because they breed and sell dingo pups to people as ‘pets’. I do not support this. On so many levels. That’s why I don’t want to post a link back to them.  The point is, this dingoes result was 100% genetic ‘purity’. I’m uncomfortable with genetic purity when it comes to what is and isn’t a dingo, for a number of reasons. There are genetically ‘pure’ dingo with known (and human caused) hybrid ancestry who have been bred in captivity for generations. These dingoes are bred to live with people and other dingoes (and dogs), and wouldn’t last a week in the wild. They are bred with the appeal to save the species, used to conduct behavioural research and are supposedly to be re-wilded in the future when dingoes are obsolete. You can have a litter of hybrid pups, with a wide range of dingo DNA percentages, that may be crossed with dingoes to result in “pure” dingoes within a few generations, which is a bit of an indicator of the redundancy of testing. I’m personally more inclined to use the low/ mid/ high content terms for known hybrids, as used with US wolfdogs, though there aren’t often cases when this is even necessary. If an animal fits the phenotype, if it eats, behaves, and has the combination of dingo traits (despite characteristic variation), it’s a dingo. This is what causes so much confusion and problems in a number of areas of dingo management, conservation and research. What does a dingo look like? You can get so many answers from so many people, and often the context will reflect that description.  I have spoken with a number of farmers and shooters who have shown me animals they have killed, when I ask what they believe is a Wild Dog vs a Dingo. Some will say they are one and the same, but many say it wasn’t a dingo - it was a wild dog, a domestic dog living feral. A kelpie cross, a shepherd cross, greyhound cross. The animal in the photo has almost always been a dingo, and they are surprised when I tell them so, and show them evidence of the diversity of what dingoes can look like. Many of them believe dingoes to be extinct on the mainland, saying all dingoes are bred out by dogs. This is where the misinformation in this country leads to, unlike wolf and wolfdog problems in America. Here, the misinformation is the intentional ambiguity and categorisation of dingoes/ hybrids/ dogs to serve the agendas of interest groups, not individual ego. Dingoes are one of the most hated animals here and responses to them being kept in captivity, even as family members, are not often met with positive reactions.

“ Dingoes are dog-like and possess a fairly broad head, tapered muzzle, erect ears and a bushy tail (Kerr, 1792; Fig. 6). Relative to similar-sized domestic dogs, dingoes have longer and more slender muzzles. The 19th century dingoes we examined, like wolves but unlike many dogs, do not possess dewclaws on the hind legs (Ciucci et al., 2003). Dingoes can have five basic pelage colours: yellow, brown, ginger/red, black and white (Cairns, Wilton & Ballard, 2011). These colours occur in various combinations and 19th century skin specimens included animals that are entirely white (Fig. 6), entirely yellow/brown (Fig. 6), entirely black, yellow with white patches (Fig. 6), particularly at the tip of the tail and ankles (Fig. 6), and yellow with black fur along the dorsal parts of the body (sable, Fig. 6). The original specimen of C. dingo (Fig. 1) illustrated in Mazell & Phillip (1789) was uniformly brown on its dorsal surface, with the face, underparts and feet being white (Kerr, 1792). Other pre-1800 paintings included colours such as dark brown, reddish brown, and sandy with sabling (Supporting Information Figure S1).

The specimen of C. macdonnellensis (Matschie, 1915) ZMB 22418 at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, and the specimen of C. familiaris australasiae (Desmarest, 1820) at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, were both predominantly yellow with some dark fur along the dorsum (sabling).

Historical records describing dingo colours are scant, and mostly not detailed (Elledge et al., 2006). The earliest report of a dingo from 1697 is of a ‘yellow-dog’ near Jurien, Western Australia (Abbott, 2008). Collins (1798) reported dingoes in the Sydney region as ‘two colours, the one red with some white about it, and the other quite black’. Explorer Mitchell (1839) reported a ‘small black native dog’ in northern central New South Wales in 1832. Historical descriptions of dingoes from Western Australia during the period 1826–1890, compiled by Abbott (2008), include red, yellow, black, black and white, white, tan and tawny animals.

These dingoes have features that indicate possibly hybridisation, but they are all successfully living wild, follow dingo-like breeding patterns, have a distinct territory and hunt native animals (like the brindle male with the bandicoot). When I say they all show some signs of dog history, it is only slight, unlike hybrids which are in captivity as companions. The top dark sable male looks like he may be a dingo-dog for how square his muzzle is, his paws are a bit splayed, and he has quite a stocky build and lower tuck. The black dingo with the white tip is the female of this breeding pair, who live on their own and breed once per year - so they are following dingo behavioural phenotypes, even though her eyes are a bit softer and rounder than a dingo, and her ears are in a higher position.. she actually looks a tiny bit border collie-ish? The longer haired brindle is another cool tiger striped dingo, but not a very clear photo. They’ve got a huge bandicoot for dinner, and as much as the photo is terrible to judge, they seem to have a more doglike body shape, shorter legs and are much heavier set than a typical dingo (which weighs 16kg).

It’s often repeated that hybridisation is the biggest threat to dingoes as a species, but this has been addressed in the most recent paper detailing the Taxonomic status of Australian Dingoes, and confirming their place as a native canid species of Australia - entirely seperate from breeds and subspecies of dogs or wolves. 

“There are three reasons why the frequency of dingo–domestic dog hybrids might be overstated; (1) Current DNA testing methods (i.e., Stephens et al. 2015 or Wilton 2001) were designed without knowledge of the geographical, phenotypic, and genetic variation within dingoes (Cairns & Wilton 2016, Cairns et al. 2017). Thus, when comparing dingoes in southeast Australia to those in the northwest, they might appear different, and so could be falsely labelled as having dog ancestry. (2) Most studies of the genetic integrity of dingo populations have been done with the goal of establishing the distribution of dingo–domestic dog admixture, rather than of populations devoid of any dog ancestry. That is, samples used for genetic studies (e.g., Stephens et al. 2015) are biased towards animals collected (killed) from areas with high human activity and artificially abundant food resources. As a result, samples do not always reflect dingoes that do not encounter dogs. (3) There are some behavioural barriers that hinder hybridisation in canids (Hinton et al. 2018). It is difficult for a feral domestic dog to integrate and compete with a large dingo population that has a stable pack structure (Corbett 2001b). As is the case for wolf hybridisation with other Canis species (Vilà & Wayne 1999), behavioural and physiological differences make mating difficult, and hybrid offspring can exhibit lower fitness in the wild. 

For these reasons, Vilà and Wayne (1999) argued that hybridisation is not a major management concern, and that natural selection will help ensure that the behavioural sequences necessary for survival and reproduction are maintained and passed onto subsequent generations (Jones 1990). Research on dingo-domestic dog hybridisation raises the question of how the biological population of dingoes is delimited. The proposed definition of a dingo by Smith and Savolainen (2015) excludes all dingoes that have dog ancestry (as well as free-living domestic dogs with modern domestic ancestry, such as a pet dog that has escaped a farm, a hunting dog abandoned in the bush, or a village dog). 

Dingoes are diverse! They don’t all look like the fella in the last photo, but for all intents and purposes, they are all dingoes. These dingoes are being researched in the one area and population, and are closely related (from the same kin group). The variation in colour morphology cannot be the only thing considered when you look at a dingo. These animals have the same genes, the same skull morphology, body structure, behaviour, hunting patterns and live entirely independent of humans. These are not a feral domestic species, they are dingoes - Canis Dingo, not Canis Lupus or Canis Familiaris. 

edit:  There is a 178 SMITH ET AL. · Zootaxa 4564 (1) © 2019 Magnolia Press “...general perception, both in the scientific literature and the lay public more generally, that dingoes are uniformly yellow (or ginger) with white markings at the extremities. However, while this is often the case, old skins show that other pelage colourations also existed in remote areas in the 19th Century, including animals that were black with brown extremities, animals with dark dorsal fur (sable colouration), and white (Crowther et al. 2014).