Short Stuff: Dingoes!

Are dingoes dogs? Not really? Then what are they? Listen in to find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Chuck and Dave's here in spirit of course, and this
is short stuff on dingoes. And I can bet you
a trillion dollars the next thing that Chuck is going
to say, hmm, could be one of two things. No,
it's just the one I met dingoes in Australia and

(00:28):
I just lost a trillion dollars because of you. Were
you gonna say a dingo ate, my baby? I was
going to say that. You were going to say that. No,
I really was going to save that uh. And and
talk very briefly about when we went on our tour
of Australia and my buddy Scotty met me over there
and we were able to take a couple of days
and go to this uh and we did a lot

(00:49):
of stuff. But one day we went to this I
guess a game ranch. I don't know what they call
him over there, but you know, we hold koala bears
and all that stuff, and we got to have the
dingo experience where we out into a dingo pin. Yeah.
I fought him, Yeah, I fought him to the dead.
It was cool and it was it was like, did

(01:10):
you see dingoes when you were over there, did you
meet anything? No, I I know, And it's weird, like
because because you did something like that too, right, Yeah,
we saw I don't think I saw dingoes. We went
to one of those things. We hung out with kangaroos
and hung out with koal and all that stuff, But
I don't remember seeing a dingo. And I looked up
dingoes and I was like, that is not what I
had in my head. And I realized I've been thinking
hyenas this whole time. Yeah, it's they were, you know,

(01:33):
because you want to as a dog owner for my
whole life, you wanted to be like, oh, it's just
a dog. But it's not just a dog. It was different.
It had a different disposition, they walked a little different.
It was um it's sort of like when you see
a coyote and you're like, oh no, no no, no, that's
not a dog. Yeah, it's a wild dog. Yeah. And
a dingo. Actually inteen got its own designation as Cannis

(01:59):
Familiar RS. And this was all in my research to
find out, like, is a dingo a dog really? And
I think that they are descended from the same line,
but they have their own distinction. Now, well, Caine is
familiaris is the dog that's the domestic dog, like momos
a Kene is familiaris Lucy's kines. No, there was another one.

(02:21):
Then they came up with a new name altogether. Okay,
so it is its own species thing because I saw
somewhere um that that host on a I think it
was called Animal Logic, uh did a YouTube video I
watched on them, and she said that that they may
be their own species. So that's a new thing. Then
I think I'm double checking now because I feel like

(02:45):
a dope. It says dingo declared a separate species. I
think I just got the name wrong. God, look at
those cute little guys. I know they are cute. They
look you know what, they look a lot like or
she but he knews they totally do. My friend Meredith
has those and they look a lot like those. Yeah,
and which would makes sense because they have definitely connected.
I don't think definitively, but let's say that they definitely

(03:08):
and that somebody carried out a study. So they definitely
carried out a study, but that they connected dingoes to
Southeast Asian dogs and uh, sheba, you knew are definitely
Asian East Asian UM. So it's entirely possible that they
are highly related. At the very least they look a
lot like sheba, you knows, and we can at least

(03:28):
leave it at that right, And of course they are
still in Asia today as far as their distribution. But
they really you think of Australia when you think of
a dingo, They've been around for thousands of years there.
They are UM I think, the largest mammal carnivore in Australia.
And depending on where you find these guys in Australia,

(03:51):
they might be different colored if you what you usually
think of is that sort of like the sheba's, those
sort of ginger coats with a little white feet, a
little white feet socks. But apparently they can be a
little more golden yellow UM in the desert, I think yeah,
And they can also be the ones that live along
the edges of a forest are usually a darker brown

(04:13):
or even almost black too so, and they can they
can live wherever. Apparently it's a source of water is
the thing that really limits them because they'll eat just
about anything and their opportunistic feeders. But depending on where
they live, their their coats will have developed a different color,
that's right. Uh, they breed once a year and they

(04:35):
have five or six little pups and they'll raise them
cute and uh they raise them in like protected areas,
like a sheltered rock area. It says here that they
can they can be raised in wombat burrows or rabbit
warrens or hollow logs. And I believe they wean at
about two months and they could either be left behind

(04:56):
there that the mom and the dad both help raise,
which is kind of cool. But at that two month
period when they're weaning, they can either be abandoned or
they might hang around for about a year and freeload
on the couch. All right, Yeah, they're cute too. Man.
Have you seen like little dingo pups now? But I
I saw that between six and seven months they're basically

(05:18):
totally equipped to be on their own if they need
to be. That's right. They can reak havoc. They're kind
of known as a pest in Australia. Yes, especially if
you're in the livestock industry. Yeah, they can reabo on
the lads stock. And I don't know if it's still
the biggest fence in the world, but at least at
the time, the largest fence on planet Earth was erected

(05:38):
to protect grazing lands from protective sheep from these dingos
five thousand kilometers long. I bet it's still the biggest one.
It's got to be. It's still up for sure. But
it was raised in the nineteenth century by the livestock
industry saying, like dingoes, you stay over here. And it
worked so much so that they're finding that, um, you know,

(05:59):
dingos are an ape tex predator, like you said, they're
the largest carnivore on the continent in Um Australia UM.
And as an apex preator, they kind of keep populations
in check, and there's all sorts of knock on effects,
like they hunt kangaroos, and apparently they found that kangaroos
that aren't predated by dingoes um tend to overeat and

(06:21):
the population can actually starve because they eat too much
vegetation and strip the land of its vegetation, and dingoes
actually helped keep that in check. So there's supposedly, according
to animal logic, at least a debate over whether to
let dingoes back over the fence, but the livestock industry
is like nay, not like of course yes. And if

(06:42):
you're wondering if those dogs, those dingoes you're seeing our
part dog in Australia, Um, there's about a thirty percent
chance that it is been doing the deed with the dog. Yeah.
I think a third of Southeastern Australia's dingoes or hybrids. Right, Okay,
so chuck, let's take a break and then we'll come

(07:02):
back and spit some more dingo facts after this stop. Okay,

(07:28):
so we're back. I have one, Um, dingoes supposedly don't bark.
They can howl. They communicate by howling. It's not like
they just sit there quietly and just shrug like they bark.
They don't bark, is the thing, which is kind of
interesting because well I don't know why it's interesting now
that I think about it, but it seemed interesting at
the time when I first heard it. Yeah, I think

(07:49):
they can bark, but they tend not to. They tend
to communicate with those little holley sounds. Right. So um,
that was really I think the last great dingo fact
leading up to the big finish, don't you think? Yeah,
the big question did a dingo eat that baby? Well,
tell everybody what you're talking about, especially the ones who
haven't seen Seinfeld aren't fans of the Meryll Meryl Street. Yeah,

(08:13):
there was a movie called what was a Cry in
the Dark in nineteen or just Crying the Dark in
nineteen where Meryl Streep played Lyndy Chamberlain with the very
famous Selacious murder trial that happened in the nineteen eighties
when very very tragically Um her her young daughter, Azaria Chamberlain,

(08:37):
was nine weeks old and disappeared when they were camping
in Australia and she was She went to prison for murder,
they said, they concluded, and this is without any kind
of evidence whatsoever. They concluded that it was actually a
sort of a lack of evidence that helped convictor Um
that she like slit her baby's throat in the car

(08:58):
and then went back in was with her camping, you know,
with her family camping, and then went back into the
tent and started screeching out the famous lines A dingo
either took my baby or a dingo ate my baby, yes,
and like so Australia didn't show its best face on
this initially. There was like basically a like Australians just

(09:21):
didn't believe at the time that dingos would would unprompted
or unprovoked attack human and carry off even a nine
week old baby. It just didn't make sense. There was
no record of them ever doing that, so it seemed
unlikely to begin with. But I read also that they
that there was apparently a bit of um xenophobia against
the Chamberlain family because they were Seventh Day Adventists. I

(09:43):
think so, like there were rumors that the daughter's name
meant um sacrifice in the wilderness um, and just weird
stuff like that, like like nothing pretty um. And and
the idea that Lyndy Chamberlain was actually put in prison
on just total circumstantial evidence. Uh, it's pretty significant she

(10:07):
was finally released, and I think the family was paid
by the state um because she got railroaded and everyone
knew she didn't actually do it. But there was just
never any conclusive evidence that a dingo did eat her
baby until another kid got attacked, right, Well, I didn't
hear about that. Um. One of the big pieces of

(10:29):
lack of evidence was the fact that she said that
her baby had on a what's called a Mattinee jacket.
It's like a little it's sort of like a little
cape cardigan thing that you put on a baby, and
they didn't find that thing anywhere, so they were like,
she's lying because a mother knows how they dressed their babies.
And they recovered the baby clothes, but um which had

(10:50):
some blood on him around the neck, which is why
they thought she slit her throat. But they didn't recover
this Mattinee jacket, and so that helped convict her. And
then uh, in nineteen eighty six, a guy was climbing
uh in that camping area, fell to his death, and
when they discovered the remains a few weeks later, they
found that little Matinee jacket and that helped. Uh. That

(11:13):
helped spring her from prison. Okay, well, then maybe it
was the popular public opinion changed when it emerged that
like other kids had been attacked by dingoes or were
later on. And then finally, I think in two thousand twelve,
you dug up a New York Times article that UH,
the fourth coroner's inquest into the death of his area

(11:34):
chamberlain UH finally vindicated Lyndy Chamberlain said that no dingo
did kill this little girl. It's definitely not her mom,
and they amended her death certificate finally final, like true vindication. Yeah,
but apparently Lindy Chamberlain was like, I'm not giving up.
I'm going to keep agitating for these corner in quests
until I'm finally exonerating. And then she finally was so

(11:58):
that's dingoes. Uh. You can try and sugar on them
like dogs, but the ones at this game wrench weren't
weren't dogs. They didn't want to snug as much. Okay,
good advice. I pulled out all the stops. I know,
all the tricks you tried to give him, pap RONI. Yeah,
I gave him all the scritches and all the right places,
and they were just like, okay, I'll be over here. Yeah.

(12:18):
Thanks human. Let's stop doing this immedian and speaking of,
let's stop doing this immediately. Short Stuff is out. Stuff
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