I want a Dingo!
If you have absolutely no acquaintance with the breed, I would suggest the adoption of a 3-year-old child, who has A.D.D. Feed the child 10 mars bars a day, washed down by 10 litres of red cordial; keep it up for a month. Then ask yourself if you want to deal with this sort of behaviour and responsibility for 15 to 20 years.
They are cute! They are cuddly! They are adorable!
They are manipulative. They are cunning. They enjoy your suffering.
They will tear off into highways at rush hour, committing mass carnage along the way, never to return. They will dance around as you dodge Fords and Mack trucks and fling yourself across intersections in the effort to return their leash to your clutching hands. And you'll do it over and over again. Because, of course you are dumb enough to want a Dingo in the first place, and we LOVE them!
I'm dumb for wanting a Dingo? That's MEAN!
Of course I'm mean!!
Did you think it's a sign of intelligence to want an animal that considers obedience to be an amusement for the lower classes (AKA all other dogs)? A dingo that views you with little more than tolerant affection ("Aren't they sweet? I've had them since I was 6 weeks old!")? Scary.
I STILL want a Dingo!
Masochist.
Get psychotherapy. You'll need it for...
...the times your Dingo stands 500 metres away, daring you to take one step in her direction. When you do, she takes off like she's been fired from a cannon. This can go on for months - Dingoes are easy to amuse.
...the times she decides to take off down the street, up trees, on rooves of houses, yes, I kid you not!! Deaf and blind to anything but what her dear little heart desires (which is putting as much distance as possible between herself and the human race).
It is virtually guaranteed by the hand of God that at some point in your Dingoes lifetime, you will be chasing her down a busy street, screaming her name, risking your own life, to the varying amusement of spectators. Of course she will be having the time of her life and would not do anything so ridiculous as let you catch her. You've never been so amusing as you are now. Of course you will be suitably attired for the chase, wearing a short tatty dressing gown that has been washed with the towels and jeans too often and has no buttons left.
(She may vary this amusement by ignoring your increasingly hysterical commands for three hours, but marching merrily up to the first stranger who snaps his fingers and says "What a beautiful Husky!") Don't even talk about the gift, in the form of a $10000 fine, yes, that's right, ten thousand dollar fine that the Department of Sustainability and Environment will bestow upon me for my pride and joy being on the run. The only way to recapture your dingo is to exercise your sniper skills and shoot it, before someone else does. By law, a loose dingo must be shot.
And you can't even torture her. She's just so damn cute.
Are Dingoes hard to train?
A Dingo can learn all the basic obedience commands (Come! Sit! Stay! Down! Heel!) in a couple of casual lessons. They're smart. And they'll get smarter if you feed them bits of bacon when they do something right. A problem with these little psychos is that while they learn commands, they also have figured out how a lead works, how it doesn't work when you're not attached to it, how long it is (to the last inch), how fast you can run, and how fast they have to run to keep the lead about three kilometres ahead of you.
With frequent, consistent training, you may be rewarded with a Dingo who just might, if the weather is right and there is nothing to chase or destroy in the surrounding area, if facing due north, with a slight easterly blowing, come when called, only indoors. More chance of hell freezing over before this occurs but it's a nice thought?.Bribe your Dingo readily and often for obeying commands with food and praise and you have the best chance of tipping Her Majesty's whims in your favour.
Try the 'yank-and-smack' routine and you'll end up with an unhappy Dingo. Unhappy Dingo will come up with Annoying Dingo Consequences for Stupid Ownership. These can be, but not limited to, sudden deafness, the refusal to move AT ALL, ear-splitting screams that send the neighbours racing to call the RSPCA, or lamblike obedience followed by a dash for freedom that jerks the lead out of one's hand and sends one on another three-hour chase. Unhappy Dingoes may be timid, sullen, or aggressive and may repay you with many entertaining behaviour problems that you will never be able to fix. If a dingo fears for its own safety it will defend. With a very capable set of teeth. Don't bully your Dingo. You will be bitten.
Remember, you were dumb enough to get suckered in. It's YOUR fault you didn't get a quiet, compliant Collie or Lab-type dog that simply lives to throw itself at your feet.
Do not trust your Dingo off lead in a confined space, eg: the lounge room, unless you are certain that you have hours to spare in which to catch her. Come when its called..?? Dingoes won't. In this case, unless you wish to join the statistics of owners who say "Well she was always well behaved until...[insert tragedy here]" do not let your Dingo run free in an uncontained area. You will never see it again.
How are Dingoes with other pets?
Can they catch it and eat it?
Other dogs?
Bindi gets along with one other dog, my male adult Rottweiler... and has decided that all other dogs on the planet are Not Worthy. She may sniff them; they can't sniff her. If they have the temerity to try, she will separate their heads from their necks. Male, female, spayed, neutered - it's all the same to her. Apparently Dingoes, especially the females are bad for this. Bindi doesn't give a damn if the dog in question outweighs her by some eighty pounds.
Cats?
Perfectly fine, Bindi just loves cats, except she can't quite eat a whole one...
Small pets?
If your hobby is raising canaries, guinea pigs snakes, and mice, you may want to invest in another breed. Do not obtain a Dingo if your passion is watching hand tamed budgies roam free in your living room.
Dingoes have an extremely high prey drive, their predator status being equal to that of a saltwater crocodile. If it runs away, your Dingo will kill it and eat it. If it stays still your dingo will kill it and eat it. Pretty much everything living must die. Do not trust your Dingo with anything living.
How are Dingoes with children?
Any breed of dog can live harmoniously and safely with children if it is raised and trained to respect children and also is respected by them. This is the owner's FULL responsibility. But we are talking dingo, NOT dog. Never trust any dingo alone and unsupervised with very young or strange children. If something BAD happens, it happens because YOU were stupid enough to leave a creature whose instincts and reactions are completely different from your species' along with a completely clueless pre-adult human. Dingoes are NOT furry people, they do NOT share our cultural and moral values and they should NOT be expected to reason out our social mores.
A Dingo that is mauled and tormented by brats will defend with its teeth, out of fear. Those jaws are very strong. A Dingo could conceivably kill a toddler if motivated to do so.
This is not to say that they are likely to do so or are prone to leaping on and attacking small infants. This is a realistic view of a species different from us, which must be understood and handled properly in order to live safely in captivity.
I never leave Bindi or any of my critters alone adults or children, anyone at all really. No, it doesn't matter how good she is. I will not take the risk of something happening to satisfy a Disney-eye view of how dingoes are 'supposed' to behave. Accidents happen, kids do funny things, or Bindi could suddenly decide to take a chunk out of the ice-cream cone Junior is munching on. I don't know what could happen and I certainly don't care to find out.
What about grooming? Do Dingoes shed much?
Dingoes don't shed. They explode.
No, your Dingo has not gained weight or been a freak body perm experiment. It is admittedly disconcerting to find your sleek little dingo resembling a Jex Pad. Even worse, your house is filled with downy little mats that strain your coffee and add substance to your food.
The underfur that comes from one Dingo during one shedding season would do credit to a dog four times its size. They don't think like medium sized animals and they certainly don't shed like medium sized animals. However it must be noted that Dingo undercoat comes out most efficiently when adhered to formal dress, customary regulation navy blue uniform clothes, any sort of food, or dog-hating visitors. You arrive at my home in nylon socks; you leave 3 inches taller on woollen..
Don't leap off the twenty-fourth floor of your apartment just yet. It does end... really.
Do they chew? Bark lots? Dig?
Do they chew? More properly, what DON'T they chew? Bindi has destroyed every precious item I ever owned, and many other previously valuable, totally irreplaceable sentimental objects that now resemble recycled dingo vomit. Don't even mention vehicles found knee deep in foam rubber (I always wondered what car seats were made of inside). Roof lining shredded on the floor and chewed up door rubbers are a common sight.
She's gotten better now that she's older, but every so often finds it amusing to remind me of my complacency. Supervise your Dingo 24 hours a day or resign yourself to mass destruction. Dig?? Not since trenches became fashionable. Bury the fencing four feet underground and cement it in. Ideally install a lid over the entire yard, and hope for the best.
Providing different amusements and proper confinement for your Dingo is good if you wish to keep her from chewing your computer cords, tunnelling to the neighbour's chicken coop, or keeping the neighbourhood aware of every movement within one kilometre of your house. Your neighbours will thank you and the death threats will eventually cease.
Dingoes don't bark, wonderful you say? Wait until you hear the noises they can make..!! Their vocal chords allow them to make 12 different noises - each dingo will pick 3 or 4 as their own. When my 3 get going they sound like 12 dingoes!!.. this enables them to accurately count how many are in a pack. Eg: 10 drinking from a water hole,, 20 incoming commence to howl,, then 10 will vacate the water hole to make way for the 20 incoming? too many to stay and fight,, if the numbers are reversed,, different story..
Too much work for such a cute animal? I suppose dodging cars and crawling through other people's back yards and leaping paling fences half naked are hobbies of yours?
While you're at it, put a roof on the fence or at least an insert that extends inward or you'll look out the window one day to see your Dingo sail over 4 metres of chain-link.
'Bindi' - Australian Desert Dingo, 10yrs old.
During Bindi's puppy hood, was there anything that stands out?
"Where's Bindi??!!?"
I must have committed some horrible crime in a previous life to deserve this dingo. I love her so much but she is every bit dingo and then some. She is a thief, a clown, a dingo on springs when choosing to evade capture and for a quiet dog the loudest I have ever heard. Last month she began a screaming episode that brought out concerned neighbours and sent me to the Chemist to spend $10 on Stingoes to discover that she had not broken her leg that was outstretched and stiff, she had been stung by a bull ant. Yeah, so, Dingoes tend to overreact. Understatement. Neighbours are still asking what happened to her that day.
Anyway, this has given me a sense of what my life will continue to be like and the reassurance that I am not alone! I wish I had been given that advice prior to bringing this darling little precious golden nugget into my life, but then I think of all the exercise I would miss - racing out the door, down the street and around the block in pursuit of her! Where's Bindi? The most terrifying comment in our home!
Sue.