Wandi Goofy / Instagram
Discovered in the south-east of Australia 3 months ago, a young canine has been the subject of a DNA test. The results recently revealed that it is not a dog, but a dingo.
Last August, a resident of Wandiligong , a rural town in Victoria state, discovered what he thought was a puppy or fox lost in the back of his property, reports the Washington Post . He then took him to a veterinary clinic . But last Thursday (October 31), the Australian Dingo Foundation announced that the animal was in fact a young dingo , a wild dog living mainly in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the species is native.
This organization responsible for the preservation of the species, classified as vulnerable by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), clarified that it belongs to one of the 3 Australian varieties of dingoes threatened with extinction : the alpine dingo. The other 2 are the so-called “interior” dingo and the tropical dingo.
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After his stay in the veterinary clinic, the canine, which has since been given the name Wandi , was transferred to the Australian Dingo Foundation sanctuary . The latter indicated that it should be part of its program to reintroduce the subspecies along with 40 of its congeners. Non-hybrid Australian alpine dingoes are increasingly rare in the country, so Wandi’s discovery is very good news .
This variety of dingo, like so many others, is under serious threat from crossbreeding with domestic dogs and poaching .