An Australian wildlife sanctuary is carving out a niche exporting dingoes to foreign zoos, aiming to preserve rare bloodlines and shatter misconceptions about the native dog.
Lyn Watson has dedicated more than 20 years to preserving the dingo, which is in danger of disappearing in its pure form due to interbreeding with wild dogs and human encroachment on its habitat.
Watson's Dingo Discovery and Research Centre in rural Victoria has about 30 of the animals, all DNA-tested to ensure they are direct descendants of the original dogs that arrived in Australia from Asia about 5,000 years ago.
She said an official declaration last year that the dingo was endangered in parts of Australia had led to a surge in interest from international zoos wanting to acquire a species until recently considered a domestic pest. The sanctuary recently supplied dingo pups to a New Zealand zoo and Watson said it has received expressions of interest from as far afield as Japan, Brazil, the US and Europe.
The sanctuary has also developed an unusual business sideline selling dingo droppings and urine by mail order around Australia. The odour scares off native animals such as possums, making it popular with homeowners and groundskeepers.
Ms Watson admitted there was a long way to go in changing attitudes toward dingoes in Australia, where many still regard them as vermin best eradicated from the landscape.
Farmers in particular loathe the animals, which they blame for killing stock, and popular perceptions of dingoes have been soured by the deaths of two children.
The first was the infamous Azaria Chamberlain case in 1980, when a dingo snatched a baby from a tent at Uluru rock in the central Australian desert, an event dramatised in the Meryl Streep movie A Cry in the Dark.
The second was when dingoes attacked and killed nine-year-old Clinton Gage in 2001 at Fraser Island off the Queensland coast, which contains one of the last pockets of pure dingoes in the wild. Ms Watson, who once bred champion greyhounds and Afghan hounds, said the dingo is misunderstood.
For a start, she said dingoes are not simply another dog breed, pointing out that it is a distinct form of canine as reflected in its Latin name "canis lupus dingo".