Apr 23rd 2025|Townsville, Queensland
Until very recently, it was assumed that Australian canines came in three varieties. There were native dingoes roaming the bush, distant cousins of dogs that arrived from Asia thousands of years ago. Then came domestic dogs, introduced in recent centuries by European travellers. Last were mongrel descendants of escaped pets and native dingoes.
Views on domestic dogs are straightforward: good as pets, but a threat when feral. Dingoes are more divisive. Many farmers see them as a threat to livestock and want them culled. But others are protective of this native animal, which is culturally important for Aboriginal people and helps balance the continent’s ecosystems.
Dingo-dog mixes, however, are an easier target for everyone. Still a menace to sheep, but also a conservation threat to the native dingoes, they can be culled without much controversy. Such culls often target “wild dogs”, a catch-all category which includes dingoes, feral dogs and mixes, but in areas closer to humans where no true dingoes were thought to live. However, new genetic-testing techniques have caused a stir by suggesting that dingo-dog hybrids are vanishingly rare. The majority of Australian canines being culled are, therefore, pure-bred dingoes.
The turning-point came with a paper published in Molecular Ecology in 2023 by Kylie Cairns at the University of New South Wales. She and her team compared the genomes of 391 wild and captive “dingoes” from across Australia—some expected to be native, others mixed—with genomes of 152 domestic dogs. This was done by zeroing in on 195,474 points in their genetic code where the two groups might be expected to have different DNA. The results showed that 70% of the wild dingoes sampled had no dog ancestry. What’s more, no feral dogs nor first-generation dingo-dog hybrids were identified. “It gave us a different picture than we were expecting,” Dr Cairns says.
A further round of DNA analysis, published in Evolution Letters in October, suggests the paper from 2023 may, if anything, have underestimated the level of dingo purity. This study, led by Andrew Weeks at the University of Melbourne (and including data provided by Dr Cairns), focused on the dingo-dog hybrids identified in previous research, concluding that the genetic signals marking these animals as hybrids originated thousands of years ago when dingo and dog first split. In fact, they concluded, dingo-dog mixing hardly ever happens—and, when it does, the descendants rarely go on to have offspring of their own. Dingoes, in other words, have preferentially bred with dingoes for so long that they are now on a trajectory towards becoming an entirely new species.
The findings are not all that surprising. Escaped domestic dogs are unlikely to survive for long in the bush, and any that wander up to a healthy dingo pack are much more likely to be attacked than mated with. The irony of culling dingoes is that, by disrupting their social structures and crashing their populations, it may make desperate dingoes more likely to start mating with domestic dogs.
Despite the revelations, Australian state authorities and farmers have largely continued with culls. The Victoria state government, one of the few exceptions, now protects a genetically isolated population of dingoes in its north-west, shown by the recent studies to be at imminent risk of dying out, while still permitting lethal control of dingoes in its eastern region.
Compromises are possible. Non-lethal measures, such as electric fencing and guard dogs, could be deployed more widely. Researchers are also investigating chemical compounds in male dingo urine which could be used as a deterrent.
As the debate around dingo control continues, Dr Cairns is excited by a yet more powerful genetic technology: whole-genome sequencing. It allows scientists to look at the entire DNA sequence of an animal, rather than an array of different points. This could help researchers dig even deeper into dingoes’ identity and finally unearth the story of their origins. ■
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