Taxonomists (boffins who name things) are a gentle, if somewhat scruffy lot and they are necessary to help us deal with pests, diseases and endangered species.
But oddly, no formal authority exists to put a tick on a name to declare ‘this shall be a bandicoot!’
There’s no high council with a big thundering rubber stamp in a candle-lit hall; no answers in the back of a textbook and God’s not returning calls on matters so trivial. At least not to me.
The authority of a name comes down to someone else publishing their acceptance of a name change.
The dingo is a difficult one — but not scientifically, just culturally.
Imagine the cane toad somehow being introduced to Australia about 20 years before Captain Cook turned up.
Cook’s resident name-caller Joseph Banks would have scribbled the toad down as a native species, jarred up a few in formalin and would have had plenty of jars to spare because there would not have been many more frogs to collect.
That Hawaiian eco-vandal would have eaten them all, and today the cane toad might stand as a protected species. Can you imagine?
Similarly, if somehow a few cats had appeared across Torres Trait about two hundred years before Cook, that would have been sufficient time I think for the extinction of many small native mammals and the moggy to now sit pretty, purring away at the top the food chain.
I won’t ask if you could imagine, say, a domesticated dog coming over with humans about three thousand years before 1776 and guessing its impact.
Because it happened.
The imaginary line drawn for determining what is and is not endemic to Australia scratches along the year 1776 and blames Europeans for their sparrows, foxes, horses and herpes.
But someone brought Canis lupus, most likely domesticated, into Australia and they did it relatively recently in comparison to how long a piece of evolutionary string took to evolve the marsupials, birds, reptiles and monotremes that are unique to our land.
That damned dog savaged the food chain and is thought to have wiped out all mainland thylacine, taking its prime position as apex predator.
Yet, because it was here ahead of a few Englishmen, it’s too sacred to touch.
The taxonomy is almost settled on the dog. Canis lupus is the species of wolf from which all domesticated dogs (Canis domesticus) have been bred.
Sub species have been proposed — one being Canis lupus dingo — but here’s the rub: They can all interbreed, and that’s how we basically define a species and more importantly the dingo came over as a pet, and I’m guessing more recently than the Dreaming.
A 2023 study is being touted as good enough reason to ban baiting for ‘wild dogs’ in Victoria.
I’ve picked over the paper and it’s very comprehensive science — dingoes are more pure than we thought.
Under one per cent of ‘wild dogs’ are from genuine backyard escapes or crosses with dingos. The remaining 99 per cent are pure dingo.
Which is what we can expect given they are all the same species and they are all doing tremendous damage to baby livestock in Victoria.
I have spoken with farmers who have had to deal with paddock atrocities of calves being eaten barely out of the womb and lambs surviving in cruel agony, guts trailing along the ground during their first dawn steps.
This impacts animal (and farmer) welfare, productivity and the cost of living.
A three-kilometre wild dog exclusion ‘front’ needs maintaining and we need a bounty for professionals to trap, shoot and bait anything on four legs with pointy teeth and which are — give or take a few millennia — a mere introduced species.
I recognise their ‘native’ status as token, defined by a date only.
We should back a farmer on this, any day.
