The photo above clearly beats my thylacine photo from yesterday.
It is supposed to be the first photograph of a New Guinea singing dog in the wild.
There are some problems with this assertion.
One of them is the animal in the photo appears to have the brown-skinned trait. All the ones in captivity, which are supposedly pure and derived from “wild” ones, have black skin.
That means that this animal likely has some Western dog blood.
The other thing is the New Guinea singing dog isn’t really what people thin it is.
For decades, there were many otherwise rational people who swore that this was a unique species. If you dig through texts from even just twenty years ago, you’ll find people promoting Canis hallstromi. It was later found, when the DNA was examined, that the New Guinea singing dog was a subset of dingo.
Dingoes are not a unique species. They are not ancestors of domestic dogs, and they are not the missing link between wolves and domestic dogs. They are feral dogs with a Southeast Asian derivation.
That’s all a New Guinea singing dog is.
What’s more the indigenous people of New Guinea have kept dogs like this for thousands of years. They’ve been modified through selection and the introduction of Western blood, but they readily admit that their dogs are derived from that “wild” source. The New Guinea singing dog as a landrace isn’t rare or going extinct. It’s just the purely feral form that is.
Indeed, if people were actually wanting to ‘save” the New Guinea singing dog, they’d use the blood from these hunting dogs.
But no, that would make too much sense, and it would also take away from their mystique as being the “wild dog of New Guinea.”
Of course, they’re going to say that the village dogs have Western blood in them, but if this photo is being used to claim that this is a wild New Guinea singing dog, then that argument simply holds no water.
Like its relatives in Australia, the New Guinea dingo (which is its more appropriate name) has incorporated the blood of other dogs into its gene pool, which isn’t really all that crazy. If you turned a bunch of domestic dogs from “rare, genetically distinct” breeds loose and let them freely breed, they’d probably incorporate a lot of German shepherd, Labrador, beagle, and pit bull blood into their gene pools.
Dogs have never voluntarily sequestered their genes. They didn’t do it for thousands upon thousands of years. It’s really only been in the West for the past few centuries that people have gotten of on contriving morphologically distinct populations into things we call breeds.
It’s that same sort of thinking that suggests we can save the New Guinea singing dog and the dingo as pure entities.
They simply cannot.
I find some of the obsession that New Guinea singing dog enthusiasts give to this animal to be somewhat disconcerting.
It’s a feral animal.
It’s interesting as a landrace and a subset of dingo.
But it’s still a dog.
It’s not a unique species of any sort.
If you want to impress me, get me some photos of Sir David’s long-beaked echidna of Indonesia Papua Province on the island of New Guinea. It’s a very endangered species of monotreme that was only described to science. It was only described to science in 1961, and it was named for Sir David Attenborough. No one has seen one in the wild for decades.
Sir David’s long-beaked echidna actually is a very rare species. It actually is endemic to just a tiny part of New Guinea.
I would love to see photos of a wild one.
It’s not a feral dog.
It’s not a dingo.
It’s actually something that could be found only in a remote part of New Guinea.
But then it’s not a dog or a “wolf,” so it’s much harder to get people to get worked up about it.
How amazingly fickle are humans.
We lose our minds over a photo of a feral dog, but we seem to forget that the island of New Guinea has lots of really unique wildlife, much of it quite critically endangered.
But Western man’s cultural biases in favor of dogs and wolves make us worry about the local breed of bush mongrel instead.
[…] « Stop the presses! Someone got a photo of a dog! […]
A pretty well thought our article Retrieverman and I agree with most of your points. The NGSD and AU Dingo are “just dogs” (primitive feral dogs) that most likely at one time lived beside man. The part you might want to research a bit more is the DNA studies that have been done on both breeds.
The late Dr Alan Wilton was able to differentiate NGSD & Dingo DNA from any other dog. He concluded that the dingo and ngsd were the 1st decendant of the wolf as their dna profile was closest to the Wolf itself. He also stated that if sent dna samples he could determine if a Dingo or NGSD had ever been crossed with a domestic breed.
I myself tested that bold statement by sending him 8 samples blind. Only 5 were of ISIS listed and/or confirmed pure NGSD’s. The other 3 were hybrids or domestics. Dr Wilton accurately identified all 8 samples. Pretty hard to guess right 8 times knowing absolutely nothing about those blood samples don’t you think?
This refutes your claim that the Dingo and NGSD are hybridized dogs.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by genetic markers. Genetic markers is just a word that mean a lot of genetic difference or very little. We have different genetic markers. I am not familiar with this study but my guess it looked at only a little bit of the genome, most likely mtDNA or microsatellite analysis.
Genome-wide assays have put the dingo well within the East Asian domestic, see vonHoldt: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7290/abs/nature08837.html I’d be very surprised if singing dogs didn’t fit within that same part of domestic dogs once their genome gets included in the analysis.
We need to be careful with the words “ancient” in defining breeds. A very recent study came out that contended that many so called “ancient breeds” were just breeds that were isolated from the main transcontinental dog population: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/15/1203005109 This isolation has created genetic distinctness through genetic drift, but it is not necessarily indicative of ancient or even primitive origin.
So be careful with those term.
I think the whole paradigm with dingoes and New Guinea singing dogs. They are feral in a sense, but both dingoes and New Guinea singing dogs have had relationships with people. Indigenous Australians used dingoes to hunt and to keep warm (if you’d like citations, I can provide them), and the clip I link to in this post shows that a native people of New Guinea claim that their hunting dogs derive from a wild dog that lives in the bush, which has to be the singer.
The dogs that I said were heavily crossed were the village dog descendants, not the singing dog of the Highlands, but it is very likely that they have some Western dog blood. The ones we have in the West, except for those that descend from known crosses, are probably pure. However, the ones living in the wild have to have have some other blood coming in. The dog in the photo has a clear color variation that does not exist in Western singers. The brown-skinned allele is pretty common in thing like kelpies, though. Dogs often have a very strong resistance to inbreeding, especially wild ones, and if the indigenous population is as low as is claimed, they will take blood from other breeds.
The same thing is happening with dingoes, though I really don’t get as worked up about it as some do. The only way you can keep dinoges pure is to shoot every non-dingo dog in Australia and ban their importation. And that’s not going to happen.
I think the paradigm on New Guinea singing dogs is just wrong. It’s an interesting isolated landrace, but once isolation is breached, it can’t survive as a landrace. However, it could be preserved through incorporating village New Guinea village dog blood. These dogs could be checked for genetic markers and for phenotype and then used to preserve the breed.
But thinking of this dog as a species is really very good way to ensure it doesn’t last very long.
As used by the singer community in reference to Dr. Wilton’s genetic test, a marker is a particular mutation somewhere in the genome. What Dr. Wilton did was to find a dozen or so of them that are unique to dingo.That is, the full set always occurs in pure dingo and never in non-dingo or cross-bred dogs. The reasoning is that the probability of any non-dingo or dingo cross having all the markers is vanishingly small. He developed the test so that conservation programs in AU could distinguish pure from cross-bred dingos. There are also markers for New Guinea Dingo. I’m not sure about these, but on the dingo test, singers come out looking like dingos. New Guinea village dogs clearly do not.
The whole notion of using the village dogs to save the singer is flawed by misunderstanding. First, it is not known how many wild singers there are; they may be in no way endangered. But the natives capture them because they are superior to village dogs as hunters. The wild ones are an improvement on the domestic ones, not the other way around.
When you use the term marker, you seem to be thinking of a marker as a measure of genetic distance. That is not what it means. The unique markers are not a quantitative measure of anything. They just indicate ancestry. So that, an Asian domestic dog may share none of the dingo markers but look a lot like a dingo. It may have dingo ancestry and be very close, genetically, because the genomes outside the markers may have much in common. But it is not a dingo by Dr. Wilton’s definition because it lacks the full compliment of dingo markers. I hope I’m making things clear.
Neither the singer nor the dingo are breeds. A breed is a breeding population descended from a small number of founders and subsequently bred selectively by man. The dingo may or may not be descended from domestic dog – the jury is still out. It was probably founded on a small number of dogs. But, however that happened, subsequent selection has been natural selection, not selective breeding by man.
Tree climbing: a good example of my own personal thing, not necessarily shared by other singer folks. And that is integration of structure and function. I don’t believe the singer can be improved by crossbreeding or by selective breeding. There is no gene for tree-climbing. But I’d fear breeding a dog whose brain tells it it can jump or climb but whose anatomy can’t keep up. Further along toward personal preference I’d hate to see a dog whose only point or purpose is to hunt, bred so as to have no prey drive for the convenience of pet owners. Wouldn’t you? Isn’t it better not to destroy this interesting creature? My argument is based only on the undisputed fact of 3500 years of isolation and subjection to natural selection and on personal observation based on ownership of 1 singing dog.
I need something more than the word “genetic marker” or “mutation.” There are lots of them. Those words have a very generic meaning.
The study I posted in one of my comments used single nucleotide polymorphisms, and the analysis was genome-wide. There are only a few researchers in the entire world who can use analyze that much of the genome, and until I see singers analyzed from that perspective, I’m going to assume that they fit with the rest of the dingoes. I’ve never heard of the researcher you’re discussing, not the study in question.
So you’re basically wanting these dogs to die off because you’re under the delusion that although these dogs are feral they have never had a relationship with humans? Of course they have, and so have dingoes. How do you think the New Guinea dingo got there in the first place? Land bridge? (LOL).
This is just an insular landrace of domestic dog that has had histories being feral, semi-domesticated, and domesticated.
That’s exactly the way dogs were kept for thousands of years. Domestic dogs would run off and join the wolves. Man would bring wolves into the fold, and wild wolves would mate with domestic bitches.
BTW, there is no evidence for any genetic basis for this sort of dog behavior, and if you’re suggesting that this is the thing that makes them unique, your experience with dogs is rather limited. Do you know how many Jack Russells do exactly that same behavior?
I guess they are a unique species, too.
Did the dingo eat your echidna?
Just a little fact checking here:
This is probably not the first photo, but the second. See the comments following the announcement on:
http://adventurealternative.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/first-ever-photo-of-a-wild-singing-dog/
This is the website of the owner of the photo. He is a guide. He works for or owns a company based in Borneo. They are planning a mountain climbing trip to New Guinea in 2013 for anyone who might be interested. Who might be interested are all manner of conservationists. (Hooray for the echidna! My own opinion is that since the key to saving any species is preservation of its habitat, the more the merrier. It is better for all species when conservationists join forces. You should not put down the singer. Having an animal that the public can get close to and interact with certainly can’t hurt.)
Opinions differ as to whether the New Guinea dingo is threatened by cross breeding or otherwise. So far, it looks as though they are dingos as defined by Dr. Alan Wilton’s genetic test and, by the same test, NG village dogs are not dingoes. Genetically it is easy to tell them apart. So far, so good.
Last time I looked, opinions differed as to the taxonomy of all dingos. I am not qualified to weigh in on this – I leave it to the biologists. What is not in dispute, however, is that the dingo has been living independent of man for several thousand years. For that long it has been subject to natural selection. That, alone, would make it an interesting animal. What is also interesting is that it has developed some unique behavioral and anatomical traits, presumably by way of adaptation.
On 2 points your article differs sharply from ordinary wisdom. One is on the uniqueness of the dingo. Where, besides here, is that in dispute? I’d like to read the case for the other side.
The other point is about color. Red (as opposed to black) is the usual color. On this I can speak with authority. I bought a singer in 1967. I bought him from a zoo broker who told me that he was for sale because of his atypical color. No where have I ever heard anyone argue that black is the typical color, although it is well known that black occurs. There may be confusion because the first one caught was black. That occurred back at the turn of the century and the dog died before it could be studied. It was dissected years later. So, again, where are you getting your info? I’m just curious.
Just a warning for anyone who may be looking for info about singing dogs. There are breeders flying under the radar for various reasons. There are nutters of various stripes. There are the usual power struggles. There are arguments about genetics where none of the parties are actually geneticists. IMO, it’s only a matter of time till we see full-blown cults and secret societies, torches and pitchforks. It’s against this social back-drop and not for reasons of partisanship that I recommend 2 sources for starters. One is the New Guinea Singing Dog Conservation Society. It has a website and a group, NGSD Discussion Group on Yahoo. Principals are Jan Koler-Matznick and Dr. I Lehr Brisbin. This is as close to science as you’ll get, but Jan seems to have some detractors, including Scottie, our gracious host. (I don’t know the reason). So, for those wanting to avoid Jan there is Don Ehrlich. Search Google for Oldsingerman20 or see Yahoo group New_Guinea_Singing_Dog_Forever. You have to type all those underlines. Don has his own website where he tells the same singer history, his version. (I like having umpteen accounts.) For sake of completeness there is also the New Guinea Singing Dog International headed by Tom Wendt. I do not recommend this man’s Yahoo group because it is so loosely moderated that it is hard to tell what the moderator believes, except for his political agenda, which is all too obvious.
So, no one could argue against conserving the echidnas. But the singer is not just a mutt. It is unique and anyone who owns one will quickly find that out.
I’ve heard of black and tan tricolor singers. Black and tan exists in dingoes too, and it’s not necessarily a sign of kelpie blood.
A New Guinea singing dog is just a breed of dog.
I could say exactly the same thing about golden retrievers, and if I did, I’d be called an idiot.
But because this dog is non-Western everyone gets their panties in a bunch about it.
Tree climbing is a canard, and you know it.
There are lots of dogs that try to climb. Are you saying coonhounds have tree climbing genes?
Because honestly, there is no such thing as a tree climbing gene!
They’ve barely tried to figure out if there is even a gene for border collie clapping behavior (and it’s quite contentious about whether it is the gene in question).
I try to avoid using that New Guinea Singing Dog site you referenced, because no one has examined most of the claims on that site with a skeptical mind. There are plenty of claims– none of them discussed in peer-reviewed literature.
I have really little use for romantic stories, especially ones that confound the taxonomy and evolution of dogs.
People think that domestic dogs are derived from New Guinea singing dogs or that they are some kind of unique species, like a coyote offshot.
Koler-Matznick has them being some bizarre offshoot of the wolf lineage that probably never contributed directly to domestic dogs or wolves living today.
A lot of this stuff is romance and lore, and very little of it fits with what we now know about dogs and their evolution.
So I’m a skeptic.
There’s no doubt about that echidna. It’s rare. It’s not going to have any foreign blood, and it’s not a domestic animal.
KK does have a point Scottie. Sad-but-true, most people would be hard put to know what an echidna, much less a monotreme, is. (I can see it now, “What’s all this stink about a danged hedgehog?”) While I too think that they’re super-neat critters, I have to admit that they’re not gonna draw in the average eco-tourist the way a “Singing Dog” will. Perhaps if NG were to make them their national critter?
On second thought, how do we know that this photo isn’t a hoax? Perhaps it’s just a photoshop a diluted red kelpie on New Guinea mountainside.
Retrieverman please!! I stayed quiet about your claim that you could see from a photo taken at a distance of 30 to 50 yards that this dogs skin color was different then the Singers in North America. You claimed that Singers here have black skin which is most certainly not the case. I myself have probably seen more Singers in person than anyone in the world (via rescue work) and have never encountered a black skinned Singer (black & tan coated Singers included).
The photos (all 3 of them taken by two different people with two different cameras) were forensicaly examined. There is no layering present. The photos were also sent to several experts on the fauna of Papua New Guinea and the plant life is consistent with that in the highlands of PNG.
I don’t mean to insult your intelligence and really respected the fact that you can see thru the lore created by the Janice and NGSDCS in regards to Singers being some unique creature deserving to be something other than a rare primitive dog.
The fact is retrieverman that this sighting and photograph is significant. Kathy K pointed out the Wilton findings and that saving this “Breed” from extinction would not be by mixing it with lowland or hybridized Village Dogs. The dna of the dingo (all 3 versions) is completely unique from domestic breeds (all of them). When I sent Wilton those 8 blind samples the 3 that were not Singer blood were of Village Dogs which was exactly what Wilton’s results concluded.
It’s a good guess that thousands of years ago when Indonesia, Australia, and New Guinea were land locked the Dingo did run with man and were the first ever “dog” to evolve from the wolf.
It’s your article so if your intentions were to get some hits, responses, and a rise or two from folks working on saving the breed from extinction, mission accomplished.
Welcome to the banned list!
What I get from all this is that, at best the Dingo (all varieties) is a feral avatar of the storied Ur-wolf/dog; and at worst simply another Asian variety of C. l. familiaris.
What I can find on-line indicates that Dr. Wilton’s DNA standards (established ca 2000) are mtDNA only* (always a gamble when determining descent.) I don’t find any indication of autosomal and/or Y-DNA standards. I would be very interested to know whether he ever established updated (to include autosomal and/or Y-DNA) standards for Dingos, and if so, how exactly they fit (or don’t) on the wheel of dog types featured here in the past.
If they are unique, great! How are they unique and, by extension, how do they relate to other breeds of dog as well as to wolves and other canid species? Has anybody drawn a cladistic diagram of these relationships?
*see http://www.habitatadvocate.com.au/?tag=australian-pure-dingo
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