Scientists Tested 5,000 Australian Dingoes — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story

Scientists Tested 5,000 Australian Dingoes — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story My new book, 16 animals we grew up believing in and what the DNA really said: https://www.gideonmarsh.com Australia spent a hundred years calling the dingo a wild dog, and I think that single word choice is one of the quietest pieces of damage I have come across. The official line was that the pure dingo had basically been bred out by stray farm dogs, so culling was just cleaning up a mongrel mess. Then researchers pulled together DNA from over five thousand wild animals across the continent and found that ninety nine per cent were pure dingoes or mostly dingo. Out of five thousand animals they found thirty one feral dogs. Thirty one. In Victoria, where earlier tests claimed as few as four in a hundred were pure, a much sharper test reading nearly two hundred thousand points in the genome came back with eighty seven per cent pure. Not one animal in the whole sample was a straight dog and dingo cross. And when they read a desert dingo's entire genome she did not sit with the dog breeds at all, she landed somewhere between dogs and wolves, with one copy of the starch gene instead of the many that pet dogs carry, which is the body of a hunter rather than a scrap eater. The thing that actually annoys me is that most Australians have no idea the wild dog baiting programmes are killing dingoes, because the word dingo was taken out of the paperwork. Same animal, same DNA, protected as threatened on one side of a state border and poisoned as a pest on the other. The farmers' losses are real and I am not pretending otherwise, but you cannot manage an animal honestly while calling it something it is not.