The Loaded Dog

It is ironical that, beginning with John Locke (1632–1704), the empiricist attempt to make philosophy more “scientific” should have produced the exact opposite effect. Today, modern philosophy appears to be wandering around in the foetid swamps of subjectivity, while science marches on with its confident claims to objectivity, seemingly oblivious to all epistemological problems. Thus, for instance, Anthony Kenny points out (in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy) that, following Wittgenstein, it was accepted by all that the way to understand thought was to reflect on language (that is, thoughts can only be identified and individuated through their expression in language). But the aspirations of the cognitive scientists run contrary to this fundamental principle because they hope to explain language by relating it to stand-apart mental structures.
We might be tempted to suppose that none of this matters anyway. Surely, the speculations of the philosophers are merely abstractions and entirely separate from the “real world” of physical things and physical processes? It is not so. Science itself employs concepts which are not at all self-evidently true although they may appear to be so at a superficial level. In the biological sciences, one of the best examples concerns the concept of the species. This of course is merely one small part of a much larger problem which has occupied the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato—realism versus nominalism. Is the species a natural kind or merely a mental abstraction invented by the human mind to group similar-looking things together?
Again, we may say “so what”. From a practical point of view the idea of the species is not controversial and we manage to operate quite successfully with it. But such a view can be dangerous and, for the remainder of this essay, we wish to look at a particular contemporary example of the problem and of its practical consequences. We consider here the Australian dingo and comment upon recent moves by some scientists to alter the status of the animal in Victoria. This move is almost certain to flow on to other states. Both of us, as former biologists, have worked on the general biology and taxonomic status of this animal and have published papers dealing with our findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
First some history. Most scientists agree that the dingo arrived in Australia, from Asia, some 3500 to 5000 years ago. Presumably, the animal was carried to our shores by Asian fishermen who frequented our northern coastline long before European settlement. An identical-looking animal can be seen throughout vast areas of South-East Asia. Anyone familiar with the “country parks” surrounding Hong Kong, for instance, will have seen dingo-like dogs prowling about in large numbers. In short, our dingo is simply one member of a group of so-called “primitive dogs” to be found in India and Asia. They are almost certainly descended from an Asian wolf, subsequently passing through a commensal stage and, perhaps, partial domestication. But, there again, all dogs have probably descended from wolves.
Herein lurks the first problem. How long must a species reside in a certain area before it is considered “native”? Is 3500 years long enough? Should we regard it as being native to Australia or native to Asia? Most Australians probably regard the dingo as a native animal. In former times it was called the warrigal, the name given to it by the Aborigines. Victorian readers of a certain age may recall a poem with this title by Henry Kendall in the old Victorian Readers Seventh Book. Most Australian biologists also believe it is “native” but holding such a belief does have some interesting consequences. What is the cut-off point? In a thousand years, will our distant progeny regard the fox as a native animal, or the cat, or the cane toad?
The general view seems to be that any organism which existed in Australia before 1788 is an indigenous species. But why should that date provide such a definitive delineator of status? Should the tamarind tree, brought to the Northern Territory by Macassan traders long before Captain Cook’s voyage, be regarded as a native? In biological terms, why should the arrival of a group of white-skinned hominids bearing the same specific name as a pre-existing species of dark-skinned hominids (arriving some time previously) provide the basis for such a classification into “native and non-native”? Remember, too, that each individual species is not a fixed entity but a dynamic one, changing over time. This, after all, is what drives evolution. The “pure dingo” of 3000 years ago may well have been quite different to today’s hypothesised “pure dingo”.
Well, let’s accept that this is merely a classification based on agreed convention. From a practical point of view, the classification can help in wildlife management by ensuring that older residents of this continent are not wiped out by newer arrivals. This is reasonable enough because in most situations the newer arrivals are not closely related to the older residents and often do threaten the continued survival of the latter. But, of course, in the case of the dingo such a clear-cut distinction is not possible because the animals are closely related to the more recently arrived domestic dogs and can interbreed with them.
In any case we might argue that the dingo itself is a relatively new arrival which has threatened (and perhaps, still does) to wipe out certain species amongst the older residents. It is at least arguable that dingoes caused the extinction of thylacines on the Australian mainland for instance. In fact, if you want to be overly pedantic about it, we have no business in trying to protect native species from newcomers at all because such actions interfere with the processes of natural selection—it is normal for some species to prosper at the expense of others. We have simply invented arbitrary rules which provide us with the rationale for such intervention.
But again, let’s be reasonable. We see the continued existence of each “species” (however problematic that term is) as important—if not for the organisms themselves, then at least, for those of us who place value on their continued existence. In taking some action to protect endangered species we actually acknowledge our special status as being, in some sense, “outside” the natural evolutionary process and responsible for the well-being of its non-human components.
Having dismissed all the above problems as being contrary to common sense, where does this leave us in the case of the dingo? Granted that the animal can be regarded as a native species, is its future being jeopardised by any actions consequent upon European settlement of this continent in general, and Victoria in particular? Well, a Scientific Advisory Committee admin- istered by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (this name was still extant as of 10.30 p.m. EST, August 20, but may well have changed again by the time you read this article) certainly think so. They have recently recommended that the dingo, because it is in imminent danger of extinction by a process of hybridisation with domestic dogs, be listed under the provisions of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 as a threatened native species. In taking this action they have been supported by some biologists and by “save the dingo” enthusiasts.
This recommendation came as a complete surprise to us (to say the least) because last century (in the mid-1980s) we conducted a comprehensive study to determine the veracity of this very point. We found that in Victoria the population comprised a single taxonomic group of dingo-like wild canids, and from which supposed pure dingoes could not be separated out from their other, less dingo-like brethren. Sheep farmers in Victoria’s Eastern Highlands will no doubt be heartened by the prospect of the imminent extinction of this marauding predator but they will need to curb their high expectations. It is much more likely that they, and not the dingo, will be driven to extinction. The reasons will be explained as we delve more deeply into this drama of the Loaded Dog and examine the rationale of the Committee in making this decision.
Let us begin by quoting the relevant sections of the Fauna and Flora Guarantee Act (FFGA). Under Section 11 of the Act, a taxon (meaning simply a group of organisms sharing certain features at some level in a hierarchical order) must satisfy one of a number of criteria before it can be considered for nomination. In the case of the dingo, two criteria are used to justify nomination:
Criterion 1.1. The taxon is in a demonstrable state of decline which is likely to result in extinction.
Criterion 1.2. The taxon is significantly prone to future threats which are likely to result in extinction.
Now, before even considering these two criteria vis-à-vis dingoes, we need to understand just how the word taxon is used in the FFGA. It does not necessarily refer to a species—it could, for instance, be an isolated population or race of a particular organism whose future was being threatened by some process. In the case of the dingo, however, it does refer to a species—one that has been newly erected in recent years. The dingo is now officially a wolf and has the proper name Canis lupus dingo. We have serious reservations about this new name. Up until a decade or so ago, all authoritative Australian reference texts referred to the animal as Canis familiaris dingo. That is to say, it was considered to be the same species as the domestic dog, varying only at the sub-species level. The change from dog to wolf can be supported by some scientific data but this same data is open to other interpretations and, to our minds, is by no means conclusive. It depends upon who you want to quote as your authority—and not all authorities agree. Some authorities (notably the Smithsonian Institution) now claim that all domestic dogs should be classified as wolves at the species level (Canis lupus familiaris). However, the Advisory Committee to the FFGA still use the older classification for domestic dogs and reserve the newer one for dingoes.
It is most convenient that this selective classification change should have taken place, because it gives much more clout to the claim that the dingo, as a threatened species, is unique. But we accept that the name change has nothing at all to do with the push for protection of the dingo as a threatened species. Presumably, the Victorian Department of Sustainability people will be in touch with their counterparts throughout South-East Asia to inform them that their own wild canids (also wolves now, by definition) are similarly threatened by countless millions of domestic mutts interbreeding with them. It is a mystery to us how there can be any dingo-like dogs in Asia when interbreeding with domestic dogs has been going on for thousands of years, not a mere two hundred.
But let us move on to the actual criteria listed above. Is the taxon in a demonstrable state of decline? The Department’s Scientific Advisory Committee says unequivocally that it is. The two main reasons proffered by the proponents of dingo conservation for elevation of the animal to the status of a species at risk are:
• Since the time of European settlement, the dingo has been eradicated from most of its former range in Victoria and is now found only in remote areas of the state.
• A process of hybridisation with ordinary domestic dogs (Canis familiaris familiaris) is occurring such that “remnant populations of ancestral or pure dingoes are subject to a loss of genetic integrity through hybridisation with domestic dogs”.
As for the first point, the fact that the range of the animal is now diminished counts for nothing. There are literally hundreds of animal species whose ranges have been similarly reduced by land clearing and so on, but only a small number of them are actually threatened. Many maintain quite healthy populations. Moreover, the term eradicated should not be used when talking merely of a diminution in range. Wild canids (we leave aside their exact identity for the moment) are still in large numbers in the Eastern Highlands and still cause significant economic damage by way of sheep predation.
The second point is even more problematic. We maintain that, on the basis of generally accepted axioms in evolutionary theory, there is not a scintilla of hard evidence to support the claim of “extinction by hybridisation”. When we say “generally accepted axioms”, we refer specifically to what is now called the Biological Species Concept first elaborated by the famous evolutionary biologist Ernest Mayr. According to this, a species consists of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and that are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Rather obviously, this definition will not be of much use for those simpler types of organisms which reproduce asexually, but it is useful for mammals. There are other ways of defining mammalian species but the concept of shared reproduction is the most widely held and is, perhaps, the least subjective. Besides, it has a long history. In the biblical account of Noah’s Ark each species was saved by taking in a reproductive pair!
Now, in the case of these Victorian dogs, there is no reproductive isolating mechanism. The animals, whether they are pure dingoes or half-breeds or simply straying farm dogs, interbreed freely and have done so for the last two hundred years or so. The dingoes are not disappearing as a result. At the worst, they will merely exhibit a wider range in the expression of various characters such as coat colour. Since this process has been going on for two centuries, how can anyone examine a wild canid today and say, “This is a pure dingo”? We would need to make that judgment on the basis of an exact knowledge of the makeup of the animal prior to 1788. But even if this were possible, it gets us nowhere because we have to allow for natural change in a species over time and the fact that today’s beast is not exactly the same as a specimen from 1788 does not exclude the possibility that it is still a “pure” dingo. Remember too, that the process of interbreeding between dogs and dingoes had been going on for at least a hundred years before any scientific data was gathered. Given this fact, how can anyone today look at an animal and say, “This is a pure dingo”?
For any given characteristic or measurement, those wild canids roaming about in our Southern Alps exhibit a continuous range from the most dingo-like to the least dingo-like and any attempt to impose cut-off points between “hybrids” and “dingoes” is purely subjective. To use a famous description by Hegel, the situation with these dogs is “the night when all cows are black”. We can, of course, look at an animal and say, “That looks like a dingo”. But we cannot get beyond that general estimate. Like the Pole Star, we have an entity “whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken”.
But the actual situation in the Eastern Highlands is even more complex. Consider the first domestic dog running off into the bush in pursuit of a female dingo in oestrus. They mate and wild hybrid offspring are born. In due course the surviving offspring will mate too, but purely on the basis of probability, most will back-cross with dingoes so that genetically, the line will tend back towards the dingo in each generation. This trend can only be overcome by hypothesising that dingo–domestic dog amorous encounters will be numerically greater than dingo–dingo encounters or dingo–hybrid encounters. Such a situation can only arise if the bush is flooded with straying farm dogs. We simply cannot believe that this has occurred on the scale needed. Farmers value their stock dogs and, more often than not, confine them in yards or on chains. Moreover, there are great tracts of mountainous bush country (harbouring wild dogs) tens of kilometres away from the nearest farmhouse.
“Save the dingo” enthusiasts might counter the above by postulating the existence of true feral dogs—that is to say, domestic dogs which have gone bush and established free-living populations. Over combined professional careers spanning more than sixty years, we have searched in vain, both out in the bush and in the library, for these elusive feral populations. Put simply, they are a myth. If they were a real biological entity, the Tasmanian bush should be full of them because it has everything they need—a founder source in the thousands of adjacent farms with dogs, plenty of small and medium-sized prey species, plenty of water, and plenty of cover. But it is not, and neither is any bushland which does not have extant populations of dingoes or dingo-like animals. In other words, dingo characteristics survive because they better fit the animal to survive in the wild.
Proponents in the FFGA application have listed a number of scientific papers (including, incredibly, one of our own!) in support of their claims. However, the critical scientific data comes from an earlier study which used skull measurements to classify the same Eastern Highlands population into three separate taxonomic groups of feral domestic dogs, pure dingoes and hybrids of the two; a population model that we rejected. There are other features associated with this approach which concern us, but this general essay is not the place to conduct a detailed scientific critique. Sufficient to say that we are more than willing to provide such details upon request. Indeed, one of us (EJ) did supply a detailed scientific critique to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the FFGA but, in their published final recommendation, they state that “no evidence was provided to warrant a review of the Scientific Advisory Committee’s preliminary recommendation that the taxon is eligible for listing”. They further state that the published information provided to them in support of the listing is “not the subject of scientific dispute and the inferences drawn are reasonable and well supported”. Short of using some very nasty swearwords, we could not have been more explicit in disputing the data and we did most emphatically dispute the inferences drawn.
We would like to hear from the Department of Sustainability and from those scientists who propose to elevate the dingo to the status of an endangered wolf just how they propose to protect this vulnerable species (which, incidentally, has resisted every attempt by humans to exterminate it via traps, poisons and guns over the past 200 years). In practice, any conservation attempt will require the removal of “feral dogs” and crossbreeds. Traditional control methods are obviously out of the question because in the FFGA submission, “baiting and other control measures” are specifically mentioned as being “likely to result in a decline in the reproduction of remnant dingo populations”. Any form of selective control is completely impractical. When you have a dubious-looking canid in the cross-hairs, DNA tests or skeletal measurements are somewhat impractical. Your decision to pull the trigger or not will come down to a consideration of general conformation—size, shape, coat colour and so on.
But, even in so-called “pure” dingoes, such characteristics vary about a mean and the same characters overlap with hybrid animals. Coat colours, for instance, can vary greatly. There are no management tools available now or in the foreseeable future which would allow the in situ (and in vivo) discrimination between Australian wolves and Australian mongrel dogs. Even if some sort of discriminatory control were possible, we would see this as an example of artificial selection pressure to arbitrarily restrict normal variability in a natural wild canid population. Those animals which did not measure up to some wholly arbitrary set of characteristics would be removed from the population. This is not “saving the dingo”. Rather it is saving what some people think dingoes should look like.
If the reader has stayed with us so far, he or she may now be wondering why we should be so concerned with this dingo business. Why not let the boffins do their various taxonomic pea-and-thimble tricks? Who cares! Well, thousands of Australian farmers do, because their livelihood is at risk. When the early European settlers first moved into the south-eastern ranges, they tended to clear the river flats and adjacent gentle slopes because these had the more fertile ground and were more easily accessed. As a result the pattern of land clearing which developed was characterised by long fingers of cleared land on either side of drainage lines surrounded by heavily forested steeper slopes. In other words, even quite small farms often tend to have very long “bush boundaries”. In essence, we then have islands of sheep amid a sea of wild dogs.
Now we are prepared to admit that sheep farming in this sort of country probably should not have developed in the first place because wild dogs are, in a sense, a natural risk. But it did develop and we cannot turn back history. These farmers have a legitimate case when they ask their adjacent neighbour (in Victoria, the Department of Sustainability and Environment) to control pest plants and animals and to prevent the incursions of the same onto privately-owned farmland. Wild dogs, whether they are wolves or not, are classified as pests and the department has an obligation to control them on government lands so as to prevent sheep predation on neighbouring farmland.
Once the dingo has been listed under the provisions of the FFGA, the Victorian government will be obliged to protect it. As we have already pointed out, any form of selective control to prevent hybridisation is out of the question. What is much more likely is that the Department of Sustainability will pull out of all forms of wild dog control (currently costing them in excess of a million dollars each year by our conservative estimates). We expect they will probably use the following dodgy argument or a variant of it: “Since dingoes are a rare native species and are being threatened by interbreeding with domestic dogs, we should concentrate our efforts not on killing wild dogs, but on preventing farm dogs from straying into the bush. We can no longer classify the animal as a vermin species, but must now regard it as a protected native animal. If farmers wish to protect their flocks by killing wild dogs, we will license them to do so (as we license them to kill other nuisance wildlife). We will also educate them on responsible dog ownership, set up a self-help website on non-lethal dog control options, and employ more rural counsellors.”
In other words, it seems to us that there may well be an alliance between a sentimental misapprehension of the dingo’s conservation status and more bureaucratic cost-cutting. “For every folly of their leaders,” said Horace, “the Greeks feel the lash.” In Victoria, likewise, for every successive government “rationalisation” or “reorganisation”, or “reassessment”, it is the farmers who feel the lash. Those laws and those departments of government which were built up slowly in the first half of the last century to assist rural Australia are now being systematically dismantled one by one in the name of “efficiency” or “competitiveness”. But this is false economy.
But this is not the worst of it. Dingo enthusiasts (including some scientists), with the bit between their teeth, are now calling for the re-introduction of “pure” dingoes into all National Parks and Wilderness areas. Farmers near the Grampians, or the Otways, or the Little Desert can look forward to seeing partly disembowelled sheep struggling pathetically at the tail of the mob, flyblown wounds, and all those other familiar and distressing sights associated with dog attacks. The logic for this re-introduction push is that dingoes are a natural part of the ecosystem and help to control introduced vermin animals such as cats and foxes which prey on small native animals. But these dingoes will also kill small (and larger) native animals too!
We challenge any scientist to give us irrefutable evidence that dingoes kill or drive out sufficient numbers of foxes and cats to give effective control of harmful wildlife predation. We have, between us, sifted through the gut contents of hundreds of wild dogs and have recorded fox or cat remains perhaps once or twice, no more. They eat native animals—and sheep when they can get them! Wherever dingoes occur in Victoria, foxes and feral cats also occur, and have done so since biological records have been collected in these areas. Moreover, it is equally possible that populations of some small native mammal species, severely impacted by dingoes in pre-European times, have managed to survive in dingo-free areas of Victoria. We simply don’t know.
In conclusion, we urge those scientists and administrators in Victoria who are attempting to re-classify the dingo, radically altering its status, to reconsider their decision. It is reasonable, in taxonomic studies, for the splitters to split and the lumpers to lump. It keeps them off the streets. But when these actions boil down to largely subjective judgments and particular philosophical outlooks, and also have serious ramifications for the agricultural industry, then they should not proceed. And it is especially the case that they should not proceed when it is patently obvious that the recommended action arising from the reclassification has no hope of being implemented in the field.
B.J. Coman and Evan Jones, both retired biologists, worked for the former Vermin and Noxious Weeds Destruction Board (part of the old Department of Crown Lands and Survey) in Victoria. Their scientific papers on dingoes appear in Australian peer-reviewed scientific journals.