A research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 31, 2020, claims that the New Guinea singing dog, a wild or half domescated dog with a unique howling style, considered extinct in the wild, still lives on. The study, based on DNA collected by an intrepid and indefatigable field researcher, James McIntyre, indicates that the dogs are not simply common village dogs that decided to try their chances in the wild. The findings confirm the close relatedness between Australian and New Guinea dogs. President of the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, James McIntyre, the researcher who first searched for New Guinea Singing Dogs in the forbiddingly rugged highlands of the island, which is split between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, in 1996.
These dogs remained elusive in the wild until 2012 when an ecotourism guide snapped a photo of a wild dog in the highlands of Indonesia’s Papua province. First seen since the 1950s, it set Mr. McIntyre to work on this and he, captured 149 photos of 15 individual dogs in about a month. Since he had no idea what the singing dogs were, he simply named them the Highland wild dogs, as called by locals. But whether they were really the extinct wild singing dogs was a puzzle to scientists.
In 2018, Mr. McIntyre went again to Papua and managed to get DNA from two trapped wild dogs and another that was found dead. He brought the DNA to researchers who concluded that the highland dogs were not village dogs, but appeared to belong to the ancestral line from which the singing dogs descended.
The highland dogs had about 72 per cent of their genes in common with their captive singing cousins. The 28 per cent difference between the wild and captive varieties may come from some interbreeding with village dogs or from the common ancestor of all the dogs brought to Oceania. The captive, inbred dogs may simply have lost a lot of the variation that the wild dogs have.
Their genes could help reinvigorate the captive population of a few hundred animals in conservation centres, which are very inbred. Elaine A. Ostrander, a co-author of the report, says the finding will help understand more about dog domestication. The singing dogs are closely related to Australian dingoes and the Asian dogs that migrated with humans to Oceania about 3,500 years ago. Maybe, they split off around then from a common ancestor that later gave rise to breeds like the Akita and Shiba Inu. The present data will also help address questions like ‘what is wild and what is domestic?’
Courtesy: New York Times