Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Dingoes!

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Are dingoes dogs? Not really? Then what are they? Listen in to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Dave's here in spirit, of course,

and this is short stuff on Dingos. And I can bet you a trillion dollars, the next thing that Chuck is going to say. Could be one of two things. Nope. It's just the one. I met Dingos in Australia. No, that's not it. I just lost a trillion dollars because of you. Were you going to say a dingo ate my baby? I was going to say that you were going to say that. No, I really was going to save that and talk very briefly about when we went on our tour of Australia. And my buddy Scotty met me over there and we were able to take a couple of days and go to this. And we did a lot of stuff, but one day we went to this, I guess a game ranch. I don't know what they call them over there, but you know, where you hold koala bears and

all that stuff. And we got to have the dingo experience where we got into a dingo pen. Yeah, and fought them. Yeah, fought them to the death. It was cool. And it was like, did you see Dingos when you were over there? Did you meet any? No, I know. And it's weird because you did something like that too, right? Yeah, we saw, I don't think I saw Dingos. We went to one of those things. We hung out with kangaroos and hung out with koala and all that stuff. But I don't remember seeing a dingo. And I looked up Dingos and I was like, that is not what I had in my head. And I realized I've been thinking hyenas this whole time. Yeah, it's they were, you know, because you want to, as a dog owner for my whole

life, you want to be like, oh, it's just a dog. But it's not just a dog. It was different. It had a different disposition. They walked a little different. It was, it's sort of like when you see a coyote and you're like, oh, no, no, no, that's not a dog. Yeah, it's a wild dog. Yeah. And a dingo actually in 2014 got its own designation as a canis familiaris. Okay. And this was all in my research to find out like, is a dingo a dog? Really? And I think that they are descended from the same line. Yeah. But they have their own distinction now. Well, canis familiaris is the dog. That's the domestic dog. Like Momo's a canis familiaris, Lucy's a canis familiaris. No, no, no. There was another one then. They came up with a new name

altogether. Okay. So it is its own species then because I saw somewhere that a host on a, I think it was called Animalogic did a YouTube video I watched on them and she said that they may be their own species. So that's a new thing then, I think. 2014. I'm double checking now because I feel like a dope. It says dingo declared a separate species. I think I just got the name wrong. God, look at those cute little guys. I know they are cute. They look, you know what they look a lot like are Shiba Inus. Yep. They totally do. My friend Meredith has those and they look a lot like those. Yeah. And which would make sense because they have definitely connected. I don't think definitively,

but let's say that they definitely in that somebody carried out a study. So they definitely carried out a study, but that they connected dingoes to Southeast Asian dogs and Shiba Inu are definitely Asian, East Asian. So it's entirely possible that they are highly related. At the very least, they look a lot like Shiba Inus and we can at least leave it at that. Right. And of course they are still in Asia today as far as their distribution, but they really, you think of Australia when you think of a dingo, they've been around for thousands of years there. They are, I think the largest mammal carnivore in Australia. And depending on where you find these guys in Australia, they might be different colored. If you, what you usually think of is

that sort of like the Shiba is those sort of ginger coats with the little white feet, little white feet socks, but apparently they can be a little more gold and yellow in the desert, I think. Yeah. And they can also be the ones that live along the edges of a forest are usually a darker brown or even almost black too. And they can live wherever. Apparently, it's a source of water is the thing that really limits them because they'll eat just about anything and they're opportunistic feeders, but depending on where they live, their coats will develop a different color. That's right. They breed once a year and they have five or six little pups and they'll raise them and they raise them in like protected areas like a sheltered rock area. It

says here that they can be raised in wombat burrows or rabbit warrens or hollow logs. And I believe they wean at about two months and they could either be left behind there that the mom and the dad both help raise, which is kind of cool. But at that two-month period when they're weaned, they can either be abandoned or they might hang around for about a year and freeload on the couch. All right. Yeah. They're cute too, man. Have you seen like little dingo pops? No, boy. They're the best. They're really something. But yeah, I saw that between six and seven months, they're basically totally equipped to be on their own if they need to be. That's right. They can wreak havoc. They're kind of a known as a pest in Australia.

Yes, especially if you're in the livestock industry. Yeah, they can wreak havoc on the livestock. And I don't know if it's still the biggest fence in the world, but at least at the time, the largest fence on planet Earth was erected to protect grazing lands, protect those sheep from these dingoes. 5,000 kilometers long. I bet it's still the biggest one. It's got to be. And it's still up for sure. But it was raised in the 19th century by the livestock industry saying like, dingoes, you stay over here. And it worked so much so that they're finding that, you know, dingoes are an apex predator. Like you said, they're the largest carnivore on the continent in Australia. And as an apex predator, they kind of keep populations

in check. And there's all sorts of knock-on effects. Like they hunt kangaroos. And apparently, they found that kangaroos that aren't predated by dingoes tend to overeat. And the population can actually starve because they eat too much vegetation and strip the land of its vegetation. And dingoes actually help keep that in check. So they're supposedly, according to Animalogic, at least a debate over whether to let dingoes back over the fence. But the livestock industry is like nay. Not like the horse. Yes. And if you're wondering if those dogs, those dingoes you're seeing are part dog in Australia, there's about a 30% chance that it has been doing the deed with a dog. Yeah. I think a third of southeastern Australia's dingoes are hybrids.

Right. Okay. So, Chuck, let's take a break. And then we'll come back and spit some more dingo facts after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um,

hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the

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Okay, so we're back. I have one. Dingo's supposedly don't bark. They can howl. They communicate by howling. It's not like they just sit there quietly and just shrug. Like they don't bark is the thing, which is kind of interesting because, well, I don't know why it's interesting now that I think about it, but it seemed interesting at the time when I first heard it. Yeah, I think they can bark, but they tend to communicate with those little howly sounds. Right. So that was really, I think, the last great dingo fact leading up to the big finish, don't you think? Yeah, the big question, did a dingo eat that baby? Well, tell everybody what you're talking about, especially the ones who haven't seen Seinfeld

or aren't fans of Meryl Streep. Yeah, there was a movie called, what was it? A Cry in the Dark in 19, or just Cry in the Dark in 1988, where Meryl Streep played Lindy Chamberlain with the very famous salacious murder trial that happened in the 1980s when very, very tragically, her young daughter, Azaria Chamberlain, was nine weeks old and disappeared when they were camping in Australia. And she was, she went to prison for murder. They said, they concluded, and this is without any kind of evidence whatsoever, they concluded that it was actually sort of a lack of evidence that helps convict her, that she like slit her baby's throat in the car and then went back and was with her camping,

and you know, with her family camping, and then went back into the tent and started screeching out the famous lines that dingo either took my baby or a dingo ate my baby. Yes, and like, so Australia didn't show its best face on this initially. There was like, basically, like, Australians just didn't believe at the time that dingoes would would unprompted or unprovoked attack a human and carry off even a nine week old baby. It just didn't make sense. There was no record of them ever doing that. So it seemed unlikely to begin with, but I read also that they, that there was apparently a bit of xenophobia against the Chamberlain family because they were Seventh Day Adventists, I think. So like, there were rumors that the daughter's name meant sacrifice in the

wilderness and just weird stuff like that, like nothing pretty. And the idea that Lindy Chamberlain was actually put in prison on just total circumstantial evidence is pretty significant. She was finally released, and I think the family was paid by the state because she got railroaded and everyone knew she didn't actually do it, but there was just never any conclusive evidence that a dingo did eat her baby until another kid got attacked, right? Well, I didn't hear about that. One of the big pieces of lack of evidence was the fact that she said that her baby had on a, what's called a matinee jacket. It's like a little, sort of like a little cape cardigan thing that you put on a baby. And they didn't find that thing anywhere. So they were like,

she's lying because the mother knows how they dress their babies. And they recovered the baby clothes, which had some blood on them around the neck, which is why they thought she slid her throat. But they didn't recover this matinee jacket. And so that helped convict her. And then in 1986, a guy was climbing in that camping area, fell to his death. And when they discovered the remains a few weeks later, they found that little matinee jacket. And that helped spring her from prison. Okay. Well, then maybe it was the popular public opinion changed when it emerged that like other kids had been attacked by dingoes or were later on. And then finally, I think in 2012, you dug up a New York Times article that the fourth coroner's inquest into the death of

Azaria Chamberlain, finally vindicated Lindy Chamberlain, said that no, a dingo did kill this little girl. It's definitely not her mom. And they amended her death certificate finally. Final like true vindication. Yeah. But apparently Lindy Chamberlain was like, I'm not giving up. I'm going to keep agitating for these corner inquests until I'm finally exonerated. And then she finally was. So that's dingoes. You can try and snug on them like dogs, but the ones at this game ranch weren't dogs. They didn't want to snug as much. Okay. Good advice. I pulled out all the stops. I know all the tricks. You tried to give him paparoni. Yeah, I gave him all the scritches and all the right places. And they were just like, okay, I'll be over

here. Yeah. Thanks, human. Let's stop doing this. And speaking of, let's stop doing this immediately. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.