Thanks fugl. Interesting to get the overseas perspective.
The whole Azaria Chamberlain thing was a huge controversy, and you could get as many different opinions on it, as the number of people you asked. Even though Lindy Chamberlain was originally charged and convicted of the murder, she was later acquitted, and is now understandably seeking a Coroner's ruling to try and put the whole matter to rest. (or as much as possible).
Most folk will still have an opinion on it one way or the other. :brains:
Whatever the truth, undoubtedly the greatest travesty was Meryl Streep's woeful attempt at an Australian accent! 8-P
That, more than anything is probably the source of parody, although I imagine that if really innocent, still quite hurtful to the Chamberlains.
The dingo is not a feral dog, although is having trouble staying that way - with cross-breeding with feral dogs a major problem.
Although wolf related, it's probably generally closer in size to the coyote, though with the large range of latitudes and habitats in Australia, there is some size variation toward both extremes. The one thing that does stand out however is the howling.
It has also been recently discovered that although the sandy colouring is the norm, that darker colour variations are in fact natural genetically pure occurrences and not the result of cross-breeding - there's such a population somewhere in the 'wild dog' mountains west of Sydney. There has also of course always been pure white variations, though for obvious reasons, are short lived in the wild.
Recent research, is also proving a valuable role for the dingo in controlling the real scourge of our environment - fox numbers.
It seems that where dingoes are present in a territory, the foxes are actively predated, and they give feral cats a hard time too.
As for being 'top' predators - don't tell that to the eagles, or crocodiles! Heck even big buck kangaroos can kill them (by drowning them)
- don't laugh! I had a big 6ft buck kangaroo take exception to me this afternoon ....
- luckily it didn't come to blows or else I might not be writing this now! :eek!:
- although like wolves, the pack structure certainly helps to gain the upper hand.
They were apparently instrumental in displacing the thylacine down to Tasmania (until Europeans got down there and finished the job - permanently :C)
For all the supposed cunning of the dingo, I've seen footage of both eagle's and crocodiles dispatching them. I'm stuffed if I can remember the details of the show, although I'm guessing it was a doco on dingoes. I made a post about the eagles here:
http://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=2343422&postcount=6
The point the article makes about taking out the pack leaders and turning the teens into "hooligans" reminds me of a doco I saw on elephants; where if the alpha males were taken out because of one problem or another, then the leaderless teens would degenerate into directionless delinquents - smashing villages, and amazingly, innumerable poor rhino's into flattened pancakes! |8.|
Here's some pretty good info on the dingo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo
Chosun :gh:
