Dingo as you know is the wild dog living in the Australian outback. I haven't seen one alive though. I'd love to when I get a chance to spend a night somewhere in the middle of the island-continent.
Recently my friend Kan Nozaki translated Christian Gailly's very jazzy French novel: Un soir au club. In it appears a cat named Dingo, which I automatically took to mean the wild dog, but I was wrong. In French it means "the crazy one", coming from the adjective "dingue," which comes from a tropical disease that causes a very high fever.
I have given my former books titles with "dog," "wolves," and "coyote" in them. Logically, the next book will have a dingo in it, if not a chihuahua or a French bulldog. But I don't know. So far I haven't had much interaction with dingoes anywhere, not in Australia nor in Paris!
In my anthropology course I assigned last week reading of Marvin Harris's Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (1985). Some people hate Harris, but I find him very readable and fun, even when I don't agree with his ideas. In it he talks about how Australian aboriginal treat dingoes. They go out and catch a litter of puppies, killing their mother dingo, then take them home and pet them until they grow up. There is a very practical purpose for keeping them: they are good to sleep with when it's cold. Hence the name of a pop group I grew up listening to in the seventies----Three Dog Night.
When dingo-puppies grow up, they are dismissed from the heating role, and go back wild. Or sometimes they are eaten like Hawaiian poi dogs. How sad. They reproduce in the wilderness, hunted, and the next generation puppies are again captured to serve as living heaters.
Even more interestingly, the aboriginal used mixed-blood dogs for specific purposes. Crossbreeds between the dingo and the hounds (the greyhound, wolfhound, elkhound) were used to hunt kangaroos. Those between the dingo and the welsh corgi (my, my) were used to hunt smaller preys (of course).
Dingoes as heaters, watch dogs, friends, and occasional delicacies. If it's possible one day I'd very much like to keep and raise a puppy-dingo. Not for eating, but!
