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Breath of fresh air

October 9th 2010 02:49

Who you calling glum bum? It's this interminable winter. Is there to be no end to it?

It has been a long winter here. It has been one of our colder winters, and one of our wettest.

We thought the big day would never come.

The daylight hours have been lengthening for months, but the big day refused to come.

It has been weeks since the first leaves unfurled on the peach tree, and our own lemons have been zesting our cooking for quite a while now. But when, oh, when, would the big day come?

It came today. It came just moments ago. Standing on the front porch in warm spring sunshine, Scratchy half-closed his eyes, lifted his face as if to savour the season of regeneration and birth, and then officially announced the end of winter by opening his mouth and panting.

Honoured Zoomies readers, ladies and gentlemen, bitches and dogs, it is with pleasure that I formally announce the end of winter.

Hear, hear.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Greyhound, Environment

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The dingo could be extinct within 20 years

March 2nd 2009 22:01

The dingo, a pure-bred, wild Australian native dog, could be extinct within 20 years.

The annual conference of the Ecological Society of Australia, held in Sydney recently, was told that in some parts of the country as few as 15 to 20 per cent of dingoes remain pure, with the rest being cross-bred.

Dr Ricky Spencer, of the native and pest animal unit of the University of Western Sydney, told the conference that domestic and feral dogs were destroying the native animal.

"The domestic dogs are actually mixing with the dingoes. I guess you'd call it a form of genetic pollution to some degree (because) they're originated from European settlement,'' he said after the conference.

The cross-breeding is also turning dingoes into larger dogs, with the average body mass of wild dingoes increasing more than 20 per cent in the past 40 years.

"The pure dingo is very close to becoming extinct," and it was sad that Australia was losing an "iconic'' species, Dr Spencer said.

The canis lupus dingo is also known as warrigal, maliki, mirigung, Decker dog, boololomo and Australian native dog.

It is not technically Australian, however. It is thought to have entered Australia about 4,000 years ago from Asia, and dingoes are still to be found in South-east Asia, mostly in small pockets of remaining natural forest.

Dingoes have features in common with both wolves and modern dogs, and are regarded as more or less unchanged descendants of an early ancestor of modern dogs. The name dingo comes from the language of the Eora Aboriginal people, the original inhabitants of the Sydney area.

news.com.au, en.wikipedia.org, dognewsaustralia.com.au

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Dingo, Environment

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