There are tons of coyotes around here, but I haven't heard of any attacking kids, even though they weigh about 40 pounds too. Hopefully, it will stay that way.Much of the change, Dr. Peace says, comes from public encounters with dingoes on Fraser Island, a nature reserve visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists yearly. Starting in the ’90s, minor human-dingo incidents started worrying managers of the reserve, and in 2001 two dingoes killed a 9-year-old boy, Clinton Gage, and injured his brother. “That was really the game-changer,” Dr. Peace said. There were calls for the extermination of dingoes on the island, which did not happen, but rangers kill any dingoes believed to pose a danger.Dingoes are generally classified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo, although in the past they have been classified as a subspecies of dog and as a separate species. Physically, they resemble a generic, medium-size dog, about 40 pounds, usually tan-colored, with pricked ears and a bushy tail.They do not have some of the physical signs of domestication found in many dog breeds, like barking as adults. They breed once a year, like wolves, and when undisturbed they have a stable pack structure topped by one male-female pair, the only ones in the pack that reproduce.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Dingoes Do Sometimes Eat Babies
NYT (via nc links):
Labels:
Land of Oz,
Strange But True
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment