Article: The Dingo’s Fate

“Consider the dingo: Whether it is the descendant of an ancient wild canine or a partially domesticated offshoot thereof, is, from an ecosystem perspective, utterly irrelevant. Whether the ancestors of the dingo went straight from the teak and laurel forests of Asia to the eucalyptus woods of Australia, or whether they spent some interim period loitering about the edges of human camps, has not the slightest bearing on its current, measurable ecological impact. Nor, in either case, does it render the dingo, as a canid on a formerly canid-less continent, the least bit more or less foreign to its broader environment. ”

My 2025 article for Noema on the peculiar situation of the dingo, a wild-living canid in Australia descended from primitive dogs introduced by humans millennia ago. Following the extinction of Australia’s original mammalian predators, it now fills an essential role in the continent’s ecosystems, but can an introduced dog ever truly go native?