Rarely are we expected to adapt to the needs of other species, as we have sought to turn the western plains of New South Wales into Gloucestershire and some of our mountains into replicas of Switzerland. Queenslanders, in their even harsher tropical climate, seem more reluctant than the rest to give up these practices, with Western land clearing a state religion, and a passion to turn beachfronts into high-rise walls backed by canal developments. Even though there is now a trend to revere the natural Australian environment, we more than ever shun it as a place to live, preferring more than any nation on Earth to congregate in cities. Like all dogs, the dingo is a hunter-scavenger, and genetically the same as any domestic mutt, canis familaris. They are said to have come to Australia from Asia with human migration about 4000 years ago, and are closely related to the Asian pariah dog, except that in the harsher Australian environment the dingo females have just one mating season a year instead of the two of other breeds.
Science now knows dogs directly evolved from the wolf, through a process known as neoteny.
This means that all dogs, dingoes or otherwise, are developmentally frozen wolf cubs, specifically evolved to relate to humans. Archaeological records show that dogs have been either direct companions of humans, such as hunting partners, or scavengers living around human encampments, for at least 100,000 years. This is exactly the behavior of the so-called rogue dingoes on Fraser Island, which hang around camping grounds. As a lapsed Queenslander, I recall a campaign in my youth to save this island from the ravages of sand mining, as then proposed by the Bjelke-Petersen government. The idea of the campaign was to save all of the island's ecosystem, including the dingoes, which on the mainland were hybridising to oblivion with feral dogs.