The dingo is an ancient (basal) lineage of dog found in Australia. Its taxonomic classification is debated as indicated by the variety of scientific names presently applied in different publications. It is variously considered a form of domestic dog not warranting recognition as a subspecies, a subspecies of dog or wolf, or a full species in its own right.

The dingo is a medium-sized canine that possesses a lean, hardy body adapted for speed, agility, and stamina. The dingo's three main coat colourations are light ginger or tan, black and tan, or creamy white. The skull is wedge-shaped and appears large in proportion to the body. The dingo is closely related to the New Guinea singing dog: their lineage split early from the lineage that led to today's domestic dogs, and can be traced back through Maritime Southeast Asia to Asia. The oldest remains of dingoes in Australia are around 3,500 years old.

A dingo pack usually consists of a mated pair, their offspring from the current year, and sometimes offspring from the previous year.

Etymology

The name "dingo" comes from the Dharug language used by the Indigenous Australians of the Sydney area. The first British colonists to arrive in Australia in 1788 established a settlement at Port Jackson and noted "dingoes" living with indigenous Australians. The dingo has different names in different indigenous Australian languages, such as boolomo, dwer-da, joogoong, kal, kurpany, maliki, mirigung, noggum, papa-inura, and wantibirri.

Domestic status

The dingo is regarded as a feral dog because it descended from domesticated ancestors. The dingo's relationship with indigenous Australians is one of commensalism, in which two organisms live in close association, but do not depend on each other for survival. They both hunt and sleep together. The dingo is, therefore, comfortable enough around humans to associate with them, but is still capable of living independently. Any free-ranging, unowned dog can be socialised to become an owned dog, as some dingoes do when they join human families

History

The earliest known dingo remains, found in Western Australia, date to 3,450 years ago. Based on a comparison of modern dingoes with these early remains, dingo morphology has not changed over thousands of years. This suggests that no artificial selection has been applied over this period and that the dingo represents an early form of dog.[40] They have lived, bred, and undergone natural selection in the wild, isolated from other dogs until the arrival of European settlers, resulting in a unique breed.

Hybrids, distribution and habitat

The wolf-like canids are a group of large carnivores that are genetically closely related because their chromosomes number 78, therefore they can potentially interbreed to produce fertile hybrids. In the Australian wild there exist dingoes, feral dogs, and the crossings of these two, which produce dingo–dog hybrids.

Dingoes occurred throughout mainland Australia before European settlement. They are not found in the fossil record of Tasmania, so they apparently arrived in Australia after Tasmania had separated from the mainland due to rising sea levels. The introduction of agriculture reduced dingo distribution, and by the early 1900s, large barrier fences, including the Dingo Fence, excluded them from the sheep-grazing areas. Land clearance, poisoning, and trapping caused the extinction of the dingo and hybrids from most of their former range in southern Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. Today, they are absent from most of New South Wales, Victoria, the southeastern third of South Australia, and the southwestern tip of Western Australia. They are sparse in the eastern half of Western Australia and the adjoining areas of the Northern Territory and South Australia. They are regarded as common across the remainder of the continent.

The dingo's present distribution covers a variety of habitats, including the temperate regions of eastern Australia, the alpine moorlands of the eastern highlands, the arid hot deserts of Central Australia, and the tropical forests and wetlands of Northern Australia. The occupation of, and adaption to, these habitats may have been assisted by their relationship with indigenous Australians.

Prey

The study found that these canines prey on 177 species represented by 72.3% mammals (71 species), 18.8% birds (53 species), 3.3% vegetation (seeds), 1.8% reptiles (23 species), and 3.8% insects, fish, crabs, and frogs (28 species). The relative proportions of prey are much the same across Australia, apart from more birds being eaten in the north and south-east coastal regions, and more lizards in Central Australia.

Communication

Compared to most domestic dogs, the bark of a dingo is short and monosyllabic, and is rarely used. Barking was observed to make up only 5% of vocalisations. Dog barking has always been distinct from wolf barking. Australian dingoes bark mainly in swooshing noises or in a mixture of atonal and tonal sounds.

Dingoes have three basic forms of howling (moans, bark-howls, and snuffs) with at least 10 variations. Usually, three kinds of howls are distinguished: long and persistent, rising and ebbing, and short and abrupt.

Additionally, howling seems to have a group function, and is sometimes an expression of joy (for example, greeting-howls).

Behaviour

Dingoes tend to be nocturnal in warmer regions, but less so in cooler areas. Their main period of activity is around dusk and dawn. The periods of activity are short (often less than 1 hour) with short times of resting. Dingoes have two kinds of movement: a searching movement (apparently associated with hunting) and an exploratory movement (probably for contact and communication with other dogs). According to studies in Queensland, the wild dogs (dingo hybrids) there move freely at night through urban areas and cross streets and seem to get along quite well.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

reminders:

  • 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
  • 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
  • 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
  • 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
  • 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

  • happyandhappy [she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago

    here is engels' letter to mehring where false consciousness is first mentioned https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm

    "I shall begin at the end — the appendix on historical materialism, in which you have described the main things excellently and for any unprejudiced person convincingly. If I find anything to object to it is that you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself – in time – but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly. When one has the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not usually get the recognition one thinks one deserves during his lifetime. Then if the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated, and this seems to me to be just my case at present; history will set all this right in the end and by that time one will be safely round the corner and know nothing more about anything.

    Otherwise there is only one other point lacking, which, however, Marx and I always failed to stress enough in our writings and in regard to which we are all equally guilty. That is to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content. This has given our adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul Barth is a striking example.

    Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

    It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain, which dazzles most people. If Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, or Hegel “overcomes” Fichte and Kant, or if the constitutional Montesquieu is indirectly “overcome” by Rousseau with his “Social Contract,” each of these events remains within the sphere of theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes outside the sphere of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production has been added as well, even the victory of the physiocrats and Adam Smith over the mercantilists is accounted as a sheer victory of thought; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere – in fact if Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity.

    This side of the matter, which I can only indicate here, we have all, I think, neglected more than it deserves. It is the old story: form is always neglected at first for content. As I say, I have done that too, and the mistake has always only struck me later. So I am not only far from reproaching you with this in any way, but as the older of the guilty parties I have no right to do so, on the contrary; but I would like all the same to draw your attention to this point for the future."

    it seems that false consciousness is synonymous to ideology in the modern marxist sense. meaning it applies to all cases where ideology (pure thought no material analysis) is the basis where facts are derived from.

    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      If I find anything to object to it is that you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself – in time – but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly. When one has the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not usually get the recognition one thinks one deserves during his lifetime. Then if the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated, and this seems to me to be just my case at present; history will set all this right in the end

      And what about this humility followed by mad compliments for his dead friend?

      I wish one day to have someone say fucking cool stuff about me like this.