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A Domesticated Dingo? No, but Some Are GettingLess WildNear an Australian desert mining camp, wild dingoes are losing their fear of humans. Their geneticand behavioral changes may echo those from the domestication of dogs.

By Carrie Arnold

When workers first dug into the rusty dirt beneath the scrublands of Australia’s Tanami Desert tomine for gold in 2002, mining executives saw dollar signs. Locals saw jobs. Dingoes, however, justsaw food. Unsecured rubbish heaps around the mines attracted the lean, golden wild dog with pointyears that swivel on its skull like perfectly evolved satellite dishes. Like their fully domesticatedcousins, dingoes can (and frequently do) eat anything — including food left behind by humans.

Instead of using discarded food to supplement their normal intake of rabbits, rodents, birds andlizards, these dingoes began eating almost exclusively from the garbage dumps. But the dingoes inthe Tanami didn’t just scavenge scraps. Over several years, some grew bolder, approaching the minesites during the day, when people were still up and about. To pass the time, miners began trackingwhich dingoes were mating with each other, even creating a poster in the town’s bar with photosand names of the local dingoes.

“Typically, a dingo that sees a human flees,” said Thomas Newsome, a dingo expert at the Universityof Sydney in Australia. “They don’t want to associate with you at all.” In contrast, these animals“were displaying behaviors that are more similar to domestic dogs than what you’d attribute to wildanimals out in the desert.”

After more than a decade of studying the Tanami dingoes, Newsome has identified behavioral,morphological and physiological changes that separate the human-habituated dingoes from the free-roaming ones living farther from human habitation. These changes, such as paying closer attentionto humans, mimic those thought to have occurred in the earliest stages of dog domestication morethan 30,000 years ago. Of course, other wild animals, from raccoons to coyotes, have undergone aparallel set of changes since beginning to live in close quarters with humans. But Newsome began towonder whether something different might be occurring deep within the Tanami Desert. Humans, hethought, might be redomesticating dingoes.

It’s a weighty hypothesis, and even Newsome admits all the evidence isn’t in yet. Whether humanscan and will fully domesticate dingoes remains to be seen. But regardless of that outcome, thedetails of human-dingo interactions at remote mining camps may help reveal more about how wolveslong ago started down the path of becoming dogs.

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How Wolves Became Dogs — and Dingoes Didn’tScientists agree on little about the process that turned wild wolves into our furry friends. Geneticevidence suggests that dogs were first domesticated somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 yearsago, although archaeological evidence of possible semi-domesticated dogs began appearing morethan 30,000 years ago. Nor is it clear where dog domestication first happened, or whether itoccurred once or repeatedly.

“Their evolutionary history hasn’t yet been fully untangled,” said Kylie Cairns, a conservationgeneticist and ecologist specializing in dingoes at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Doug Beckers

Australia’s aboriginal people have traditionally revered the dingo and celebrated it in their culture, as in thisancient painting.

What scientists do know is this: The high-calorie, easily digestible food waste left in and aroundprehistoric human camps attracted nearby gray wolves. Many of the animals avoided the habitats oftheir two-legged competitors, but a few had the courage to begin scavenging from the pile ofleftovers. As time passed, humans began to realize that the relationship had benefits. Wolves couldhelp warn about predators and assist with hunting. But the traits that enabled a wolf’s survival inthe wild — characteristics like aggression and wariness — weren’t always conducive to life withhumans. Gradually, like clay molded by an invisible hand, wolf behavior gave way to something more

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doglike. Domestication, Cairns emphasized, was a two-way street. Humans didn’t set out todomesticate wolves, but both parties found the new arrangement beneficial.

As humans continued their spread around the world, they brought their proto-pooches with them.One theory holds that the ancestors of dingoes arrived in Australia approximately 4,000 years ago,when a group of seafaring people from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi arrived in Australia withtheir canines; other evidence suggests the animals arrived with settlers by other means and twice aslong ago. But however and whenever they arrived, those canines — no longer wolves but not quitedogs — returned to their wild roots after reaching Australia.

Ann Cairns

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“Dingoes can truly survive without humans,” said Kylie Cairns, a conservation geneticist and dingo specialist at theUniversity of New South Wales in Sydney. She is skeptical of arguments that the animals are becoming any moredomesticated.

“These dogs weren’t domesticated in the sense that we think about,” Cairns said. “They weren’t likea pet Labrador, and humans weren’t breeding them or controlling which ones bred. Dingoes areprobably what dogs would have looked like before humans started messing with them.”

James McIntyre, director of the Southwest Pacific Research Project, is one of the very few scientistsever to have studied the New Guinea highland wild dog, a descendant of those canids that firstarrived in Papua New Guinea and a close relative of the Australian dingo.

“No matter how you try to raise them, they’re very predatory. Even if you get them as puppies, theirinstincts kick in as they become adults,” he said.

Both dingoes and highland dogs returned to a wild state after their initial sojourn with humans. InAustralia, dingoes emerged as the continent’s mammalian apex predator. Though dingoes areadmired and revered by many Aboriginal peoples, European settlers took a much grimmer view ofthem, instituting eradication campaigns and erecting a dingo-proof fence across thousands ofkilometers of the harsh outback in the early 1900s.

“Australia is now culturally very intolerant of dingoes,” said Mike Letnic, an ecologist focusing onconservation and wildlife management at UNSW. “There’s a deep sense of antipathy in most cases.”

Learning to Live With PeopleAs a young boy, Newsome traveled around Australia with his ecologist father, who also studieddingoes. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a bachelor’s degree in ecology,Newsome moved to Alice Springs in central Australia to work as an environmental consultant. There,he began hearing stories about dingoes clustering around mine sites in the Tanami Desert. Greaterhuman encroachment into previously pristine wilderness had increased contact and conflict betweenpeople and wildlife, and Newsome wanted to understand how this played out. Dingoes, he said,made a natural starting point.

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Kim

Although dingoes look similar to some domesticated dogs, their wild, predatory behavior differentiates themstrongly from pets.

One of the most isolated deserts on Earth, the Tanami sits in the sparsely populated southwesterncorner of the Northern Territory and is home to the most genetically pure population of wilddingoes. Newsome’s work documented a group of around 100 of the animals that lived alongside themining settlement, eating from the dump site, which had enough scraps to feed up to 225 dingoeseach day. One hundred kilometers away, in the much more sparsely populated outback, Newsomestudied completely wild dingoes that had minimal contact with humans.

The first difference he noticed was in size. The human-habituated dingoes were 20 percent largerthan their wild counterparts, thanks to the nutrient-dense leftovers they found around the mine.

Other variations began to stand out, too. A 2014 study in the Journal of Mammalogy analyzed thediets of dingoes and free-roaming domestic dogs using scat samples. Newsome and his colleaguesshowed that, nutritionally, the dingoes at the mine site ate as well as domestic dogs, and markedlydifferently from the wild dingoes. A follow-up study revealed that the all-you-can-eat buffet at theTanami Desert mine site altered the dingoes’ social behavior, too: Their home ranges were smallerwhile their group size was larger, which Newsome attributes to the ready availability of nutrient-dense food.

The dingoes had also overcome their fear of humans, weaving around Newsome’s legs as he settraps, trying to get him to play. “I was putting plastic bags down on the ground as I walked along thetransect [trap line]. And there was a dingo that was running in, picking up those bags and playingwith them — dumping them down and kneeling down and crouching,” Newsome said.

Newsome found that the metamorphosis triggered by the arrival of the Tanami mines reflected evenin the dingoes’ DNA. When he compared the genomes of the mine and outback dingoes, he foundthat the two groups, separated by distances easily traversed by most dingoes, had ceasedinterbreeding. As the dingoes spent more and more time around humans, they grew increasinglyisolated from their wilder counterparts.

“I have hypothesized that where dingoes come in contact with these food resources, their ecology orbehavior can be altered to the extent that they are en route to domestication,” he said.

Newsome laid out his hypothesis in an April 2017 paper in BioScience, proposing that dingoes hadtaken the first steps toward a second domestication event, one paralleling that of the dogs long ago.The changes that Newsome had identified — the behavioral shifts and the genetic isolation — alsoprobably occurred when wolves began their slow transition to Fido. Should these changes play outfor another couple hundred years, perhaps humanity may alter dingo biology enough to have createda Domestic Dingo.

These changes won’t exactly recap the transition from wolf to dog because dingoes experiencedpartial domestication in their distant past. But Newsome said that the low level of domestication inprehistory, combined with the dingoes’ rewilding, still made this study meaningful, especially sincegenetic differences between dingoes and dogs are clearly identifiable.

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Bradley Smith

According to Angie Johnston, a canine behavior researcher at Yale University, “Dingoes give us a snapshot of theearliest part of domestication.”

Given dingoes’ ancient history with partial domestication, it makes sense that they may adapt tohumans speedily, said Angie Johnston, a psychologist who studies canine behavior at Yale University.When Johnston measured how readily wolves, dingoes and pet dogs sought eye contact with humans,she found dingoes to be smack between wolves and dogs.

“Dingoes give us a snapshot of the earliest part of domestication. This behavior could start tosupport further domestication,” Johnston explained. “The difference was not huge, but it could bereally important for shaping behavior.”

The Call of the WildBut these changes alone don’t create a domestic animal, Cairns pointed out. Other factors, such asincreased reproductive rates and a dependence on humans for survival, need to shift before ananimal can become genuinely domesticated. The dingoes haven’t yet fulfilled those criteria, even ifNewsome believes they have taken the first halting steps in that direction.

“Dingoes can truly survive without humans,” Cairns said.

Domestication of dogs or any animal takes hundreds or thousands of generations, said AninditaBhadra, an ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata who studiesthe behavior of India’s street dogs. India’s oldest surviving written book, the Vedas, contains 3,500-year-old references to roaming packs of street dogs, long predating the burgeoning megalopolises ofNew Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Hand-raise the pups of these street dogs, though, and you can findyourself with a friendly mutt and house pet.

“They’re very easy to make friends with — the puppies blindly trust humans,” Bhadra said.

Not so with dingoes. Bradley Smith, a dingo expert at Central Queensland University, said thatalthough some Australians have successfully kept dingoes as pets, the animals can be unpredictableand are far more aggressive than the average dog.

Yet ferocious traits aren’t immutable. Starting in the 1950s, the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaevand his colleagues in Siberia took wild silver foxes and selectively bred the tamest ones. Within 40generations, they had created cute, cuddly foxes with floppy ears that could be kept as pets. What’soccurring at the Tanami mines is neither deliberate nor controlled, but Newsome said that Belyaev’swork provides evidence that, under the right circumstances, domestication can occur far morequickly than anyone realized.

Letnic said that although it’s technically possible for dingoes to become a second species of domesticdog, it’s not probable. “We already have one dog, and I’m not sure people are going to see the needfor another one,” he said.

Regardless of what happens to dingoes, Newsome said, the opportunity to study their interactionswith humans at the Tanami mines provides a unique chance to tease apart some of the very firststeps in the transition from wolf to dog. Whether these dumpster divers make the transition from

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dingo to dog or continue to remain on the periphery of human settlements, however, is as much upto them as it is to us.

This article was reprinted on TheAtlantic.com.