The Dingo’s Dilemma: What it means to be native (#295)

Stretching nearly 3,500 miles across Australia’s arid interior, the Dingo Fence is the longest man-made barrier in the world.

Built not to keep out invaders or protect cities, but to hold back a single animal  -  the dingo. This fence is a symbol of our tangled relationship with nature, and of the complicated story of how one animal came to challenge our very idea of what it means to belong.

The dingo, a reddish, sharp-eyed canine with a history as complex as the landscape it prowls, arrived in Australia around 3,500 years ago, likely carried by seafaring Austronesian traders. Descended from ancient domesticated dogs, the dingo spread across the continent, eventually becoming the apex predator of the outback and displacing the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, from the mainland.

But is the dingo a native, or just a long-lingering outsider?

The Fence, the Feral, and the Fight for Status

To this day, the dingo sits in an ecological and political limbo. In one breath, it’s protected as native wildlife under the Nature Conservation Act; in the next, it’s condemned as a restricted invasive animal under the Biosecurity Act. Some field guides squeeze it between feral cats and foxes.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has gone so far as to deny the dingo species status altogether, calling it a feral domestic, a label that denies it ecological legitimacy and, crucially, protection.

All this even though the dingo has functionally filled the role of top predator in Australia for thousands of years. It regulates prey populations, shapes ecosystems, and exerts influence over the very balance of the outback. Yet it remains trapped by its perceived origins, its domestic stain deemed impossible to wash away.

The Trouble with Native

The deeper issue, of course, isn’t really about the dingo. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves about nature.

Our definitions of nativeness stem from old philosophical ideas that saw nature as fixed, ordered, and unchanging.

Influenced by the Great Chain of Being and later scientific classification systems, we inherited a worldview where each species has a rightful, original place.

To move is to deviate.

To arrive late is to intrude.

But nature doesn’t work that way. Australia was once a continent of giant marsupials and flightless birds. When humans first arrived, they set off changes that reverberate to this day. Later, dingos reshaped the balance again.

Ecological communities - the tangled webs of species and interactions - are not static tapestries.

They shift, they adapt, they evolve.

To say that the dingo is not native because it arrived with humans and displaced the thylacine is to ignore what it became: a fully wild predator, integral to Australia’s ecology.

Traits Over Titles

Modern ecology offers us a better framework. Instead of judging species based on how long they’ve been somewhere, we can evaluate them based on the traits they bring to an ecosystem.

What do they do? What roles do they fill? What effects do they have?

If an animal contributes to the stability and function of an ecosystem, as the dingo demonstrably does, then perhaps that is the more meaningful kind of nativeness. The dingo may not be a thylacine, but it is a predator. It is integrated. It has, for thousands of years, helped shape the landscape it inhabits.

In that sense, it is as native as it needs to be.

A World in Motion

On our tilting, changing planet, the notion of ecological fixity is a dangerous illusion.

Penguins migrate across oceans. Cattle egrets colonize new continents. Moose only arrived in North America after their prehistoric cousins were wiped out. Species shift. Ranges expand. Roles are filled in new ways.

If we cling too tightly to rigid definitions of nativeness, we risk ecological blindness, or worse, inaction where protection is needed.

Rick’s Commentary

The word native shares roots with natal - to be born in a place. But in a world shaped by movement, survival, and adaptation, maybe we should also allow for becoming at home. This allows for the possibility that over time, species can earn their place not by where they came from, but by what they contribute.

The dingo is a child of two worlds: born of ancient dogs, shaped by wildness, and tested by fire, drought, and dust. It is both a survivor and a sculptor of the outback. Its story doesn’t fit neatly into our categories, but it forces us to reconsider whether those categories are still useful.

In the end, perhaps the question isn’t whether the dingo is native, but whether our thinking is wild enough to catch up.

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