New Guinea Singing Dogs Are Not Extinct in the Wild

April 25, 2017 7:39 PM

He Was Searching For Intersexual Pigs And Ended Up Finding The World’s Rarest Dog.

New Guinea singing dogs have been described as the world’s “most primitive” domesticated dog. Their forebears are thought to be closely related to the dingo, a wild canine in Australia, and may have been brought to New Guinea by humans about 6,000 years ago. ... The wild dog is believed to have been the only canine living in the New Guinea highlands, which meant the animal did not interbreed with other species. They’ve been called “living fossils” as a result — possibly a key evolutionary link between modern domesticated dogs and their wild canine ancestors.

He added that the “wildness” of the New Guinea singing dog is what sets it apart from other domesticated dogs. “They are as ‘undog-like’ as you could imagine,” he said. “They’re somewhere between a cat and a monkey in terms of their dexterity. They are comparable to a family dog as far as affection goes and can be trained, even to be service animals, but they still haven’t lost that wild streak. There are just some things that can’t be domesticated out of them — and that’s actually what a lot of people love about them.”

posted by clawsoon (27 comments total)

Yay! The only time I've heard of New Guinea singing dogs prior to this was the story of Gus Pong, one of the stars of "dogs in elk."
posted by rewil at 7:46 PM on April 25, 2017 [10 favorites]

TLDR summary: While searching for intersexual pigs he discovered singing dogs and "squealed like a girl."

I think there is a bit more to this.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 8:01 PM on April 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

Did any of these pigs resemble Ned Beatty?
posted by jonp72 at 8:05 PM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

12/10
posted by schmod at 8:09 PM on April 25, 2017 [8 favorites]

Literally a rare pupper
posted by randomination at 8:18 PM on April 25, 2017 [12 favorites]

Aw, dogs.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:29 PM on April 25, 2017

Gasp they look like Shibes
posted by Hermione Granger at 8:35 PM on April 25, 2017

Paging Metafilter's Own Sonascope...
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:03 PM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

How in god's name does a dog climb a tree? Don't tell me it has something to do with an uvula.
posted by My Dad at 9:40 PM on April 25, 2017

They resemble the wild dogs we saw in Malaysia. It was weird to see dogs that wanted nothing to do with humans.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:51 PM on April 25, 2017

This story rang a faint bell in my head so I did a little research. Turns out that a guy in PA was busted a few years ago for animal hoarding with 80 of these dogs. The singing dogs, not the wild ones, obviously. They were all descended from one pair and, while a dozen or so went to zoos, they were all too inbred and many were "disposed of."

The article said that there are only about 200-300 in the world and this guy had 80.
posted by irisclara at 9:52 PM on April 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

‘Pig half-man half-woman’

I have questions.
posted by rhizome at 10:54 PM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

However, the Basenji (the other singing dog) is better with kids.
posted by fairmettle at 11:01 PM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Saving that to play the next time my neighbors are fighting.
posted by rhizome at 11:04 PM on April 25, 2017

If I read it right, this paper argues that these wild dogs are not really genetically distinct from village dogs. If earlier reports about village and wild dogs are taken into account there is no particular reason to regard wild dogs found at high altitude as a re-discovered, isolated group.
posted by Segundus at 2:10 AM on April 26, 2017

I love these dogs because I was trying to find pictures of similar dogs as my bootiful mutt, and they were the closest, so for a couple of weeks when people asked what the hell my dog was, I told them she was a New Guinean singing dog.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:30 AM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

I can totally believe that village dogs and wild dogs are not genetically distinct, but I nonetheless kind of delight in the idea that people thought the wild dogs were extinct, but they were actually just chilling contentedly away from humans.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:09 AM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

‘Pig half-man half-woman’

part-wolf, part-mech, part-rabbit, part-fox, part-sunglasses, part-dragon, part-dad, all dad, all knives.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:28 AM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Boar taint is my new Gwar tribute band.
posted by zippy at 7:12 AM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

There is no need for binary gender
Just as long as the ham hock's tender
The farmer trucks no discrimination
In his liberal love of bacon
And so, if prejudice you shun,
Make sure you taste nice in a bun.
posted by Devonian at 7:28 AM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was just explaining to someone how my Carolina Dog views being petted with the same mixture of disinterest and annoyance I manifest in the face of fake lesbian porn designed to appeal to straight men.

Ah, so you're petting me. What weird animals you primates are. Wouldn't you rather be outside, watching me finding snakes and killing them by cracking them like a whip?

I've had normal dogs, but my first one from the landraces makes me feel like I'm going to stay in this particular gene pool, with slightly aloof but steadfastly team-playing dogs with a whole weird vocabulary of dog talk and a terrifying ability to get things off the top of the refrigerator or bite clean through a live heavy-duty orange extension cord without dying, thanks to unusually well-developed carnassial teeth. All dogs are fascinating, but the so-called pariah breeds bring out one's inner David Attenborough.

Dogs coevolved with us to the point that we're almost inseparable as species, but some dogs took a step back, and there's so much amazing in that little extra distance.

I am never bored.
posted by sonascope at 8:41 AM on April 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

Climbing seems to be a trait in pariah dogs, see the norwegian lundehund which has been bred further (now polydactyl) but likely was selected for its climbing ability.
posted by fido~depravo at 10:08 AM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

If I read it right, this paper argues that these wild dogs are not really genetically distinct from village dogs. If earlier reports about village and wild dogs are taken into account there is no particular reason to regard wild dogs found at high altitude as a re-discovered, isolated group.

Kind of in the same way that dogs and wolves are the same species.
posted by My Dad at 10:22 AM on April 26, 2017

Kind of in the same way that dogs and wolves are the same species.

Same basic hardware running a different OS.
posted by sonascope at 10:47 AM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Species gets very fuzzy at the edges. The definition I was taught thirty-odd years ago was that two species are distinct if they can't interbreed and produce fertile offspring. That ignores instances when genetically identical groups don't interbreed because of behavioural or morphological differences, or ring species, where a progenitor species produces two populations which are geographically isolated from each other. It's possible then, after some time and when the two populations meet up again, for each of those populations to have changed so that they can both interbreed with the progenitor population but not with each other. One species? Three?

For these and other reasons, it can be better to treat distinctive populations or groups as if they were species, even though the classic definition doesn't apply. A distinct population of wild dogs with its own behavioural and morphological patterns will have the same status in an ecosystem as if it were a classic species, and whatever value you would give to a species should be conferred. A population that isn't so distinct, because it's replenishing from or swapping members with another group, such as feral dogs on the edge of an inhabidted, dog-heavy human population? Less so.

And on the other hand, you get convergent evolution of quite different genotypes in similar niches; species separated by millions or tens of millions of years end up looking and behaving similarly; here, for some purposes, you get further by considering them as being siblings and you can apply lessons learned from one group to understanding the other.

Nature signed no contract with Linnaeus.
posted by Devonian at 10:54 AM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't have much to add but I accidentally found this.
posted by bracems at 12:14 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Mad props to the guys who made those songs by splicing actual magnetic tape instead of shuffling magnetic domains on a disk.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:15 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]