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I have had the pleasure of dingoes for the past 14 years. Stock the original one I found abandoned at 4 days of age. She was the only one in the litter still alive, her mother probably baited or died after whelping. I raised her on an eyedropper, then a bottle at three weeks. She stopped taking milk and went straight onto solid food she was never tied up or penned up but chose to stay here because she wanted to. She would go off hunting for up to three days at a time but always came back.
You see you never own a dingo they choose to stay with you. Because I raised her by hand I became the alpha male, and it was important to have some chance of control. The Dingo is not for the faint hearted they are in no way like the domestic dog they need a lot of attention, get bored easily will chew anything and every thing they can (I think the first year of stock, I went through about two hundred rolls of toilet paper several pairs of boots and who knows what else)
The rewards are immense - to see their interaction with each other, the bush and with me. One day I was taking (I know they have one million acres to roam but they like nothing better than going for a walk in the evening in the wet season) stock for a walk when a frilled neck lizard went about eight feet up a big straight tree. She had a couple of jumps but could not get it so she walked away about five yards (I could not believe she had given up) turned around and ran flat out at the tree then ran straight up on an angle like the wall of death, grabbed the tail of the frilled neck and threw it to the ground, jumped down, gave it one shake and then left it alone. They let nothing beat them.
I kept a male pup out of Stock's first litter he got named Casserole. He once cost me six thousand dollars in vets bills and helicopter hire when he got a grass seed down in his inner ear (but he was a mate it was worth every cent). When he was about five he started to mate with a wild bitch Who lived about twelve kms away. When she whelped he would come home every day, eat as much as he could, pick up and carry the biggest piece of meat back to her and regurgitate the rest for the pups, he would do that right up to December. Then stay home in the A/C till next season. So he became a SNAD sensitive new age dingo.
Another time when he came home, a couple from broome were staying here. Amber had a new baby, which she was breastfeeding while sitting in the bar with the baby's feet on the table. Casserole jumped up on the table and was watching the baby suck. After a while he moved up the table on his belly to the baby's feet where he proceeded to lick the soles of the feet to encourage it to suck harder as they do to there own pups, until Amber said, "Enough get that dingo off its making me sore."
The "bushfoods, insects and wild flowers Of Mt Hart" mural has these words written on it (in the arc at the bottom):
'Once the earth was a garden
It gave us all we need
Then it grew so barren
All because of greed
Once the air was for breathing
And clouds caused rain to fall
Then it filled with poisons
Strangling us all
Water was once for drinking
And giving life to the land
Then it was used for cooling
The machinery of man
Dancing in the meadows
To the sound of a living tree
In and out of the shadows
Laughing with the breeze.' |