Perceptions of dingoes range from kin to pest. Social and ecological justice researcher Deborah Bird Rose explores the ethical dimensions of our relationship with this top predator.

This paper examines existing frameworks for understanding domestication and proposes a domestication landscape framework. Driven by the selection pressures of captivity and/or mutualism within a domesticator-dominated environment, domestication is the generations-long multidirectional process through which a domesticate accumulates new genetic and behavioral traits, potentially causing reproductive isolation between wild and domestic forms of the domesticate organism. Rather than understanding domestication as fixed states in a wild/domestic binary, domestication can be best understood as a dynamic multidimensional process of growing and declining (...) domesticator influence on a domesticate’s genes and behavior. The categories, of wild, feral, tame, and domestic exist as blurry regions within a two-dimensional landscape that species will traverse at variable speeds. An organism’s path will vary depending on its environment and the particular domestication relationship at play. Domestication occurs through two potential pathways, either through captivity or through mutualism, though both may no longer be required once a domesticate’s dependence on the domesticator becomes clearly established. For the purposes of domestication, captivity requires intentional containment and resource dependence or reproductive control. When driven by mutualism, the domestication process does not require intent and, thereby, can occur with non-human domesticators. Alongside the coordinative consensus principle, the domestication landscape model can help achieve more functional pluralism between disciplines within domestication studies when organisms’ levels of genetic and behavioral influence are provided. Finally, this model suggests that while dingoes may have at one point been domesticated, it may be appropriate to view them as wild and perhaps even native organisms. (shrink)

In 2019 the Western Australian government recategorised the dingo ( Canis dingo) as a wild dog ( Canis familiaris) whose status is legally declared to be a pest. Despite its iconic native status, Canis dingo has been rendered non-existent and liable to be disposed of by inhumane means. Dumped in a legal black hole via a signifying regime of signs, dingoes are confronted with the fact of their own non-existence. Regarding the dingo as a dingoing, a (...) multiplicity and a process, rather than a characteristic, I read the reclassification event symptomatologically and interrogate the constellations of symptoms and regimes of signs which legitimate the event and its performativity. I examine order-words including ‘pest’ and ‘wild dog’ to shift the focus from the words’ meaning to what they do. I subsequently enquire whether ‘dingo’ might become a pass-word, a component of passage, such that dingoes might exist under reprieve in a post-signifying regime. I argue that post-signifying regimes are codified, however, as subjects are individuated along lines of subjectification. I conclude by contemplating whether it is possible to break with subjectification, liberating these demonic nonhuman animals from the signifiers which territorialise them and permitting dingoes to become-animal. (shrink)

The Australian dingo, like the dog, descends from the wolf. However, although dogs have undergone a lengthy taming process that allows them to fit into human society, dingoes retain many wolf characteristics. Like the wolf and unlike the dog, dingoes do not bark. Dingoes howl; they come into season once a year, and they can dislocate their powerful jaws to seize prey. Since the arrival of settlers and their farming practices in Australia 200 years ago, dingoes have killed sheep, (...) and dogs have learned to protect and control those sheep. Medieval texts admire dogs for their intelligence while denigrating wolves as "cunning"—a word defined as deceitful, crafty, and treacherous. A study of Australian colonial texts reveals a popular representation of the dingo as cowardly, promiscuous, vicious—and cunning. This study compares the representation of dingoes with the representation of dogs . Finally, the paper examines those colonial writers who, either deliberately or unintentionally, allowed the dingo to escape the denigrating representation of cunning. (shrink)