The trouble here is that dingos are widely treated as if they are a separate species (a subspecies of Canis lupus, the wolf) when, IMO (and Tannin's) they are in fact just a wild breed of Canis familiaris (given the ease with which the two "species" interbreed). So I really don't know what to do at this point. Perhaps the hybrid table will do for now. --mav

Canis lupus and Canis familiaris are the same species anyway. The most sensible classification would be to have the domesticated dog classified as Canis lupus familiaris, and to keep the Dingo as it is.

I invite an expert on the Australian Dingo to come and fix this page up. The Australian dingo is a distinct breed, at the very least, which only appears on the Australian mainland, and probably has none but token connection to Asian dingos, as it is widely accepted that Australian dingo descended from domesticated dogs brought from Asia around 5,000 years ago. gwhitescarver at yahoo dot com

The dingo can be considered a distinct species as their DNA is sufficiently different from dogs and wolves, even though they can interbreed. i.e. dingos, dogs and hybrids can be easily told apart by their DNA alone. It's a slightly different definition of species, but is often used in biology and genetics. --Pengo 08:47, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Plurality

Sort inspired from a series of edits at Thylacine.

I always thought the plural of Dingo was Dingoes, but now I see it is Dingoes.

Other articles, such as octopus have a section explaining the "odd" rules of plural spelling, would someone with the knowledge be able to contribute a similar segment to this page.--ZayZayEM 02:05, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I thought it was Dingos until i looked it up on Dictionary.com, which sites the The American Heritage® Dictionary as saying it's Dingoes (which is why I used that on the Thylacine article. However, a more authorative source for this word, The Concise Australian Macquarie Dictionary, has both Dingos and Dingoes listed. We should mention both form and standardise on one form. I prefer Dingos. --Pengo 08:07, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

capitalisation (or -zation if you prefer)

What's with the capitalisation of animal names? It seems like binomial nomenclature gone crazy. According to Naming conventions there is only a weak case for capitalising mammal names. Especially as there is no ambiguity about what dingo (lowercase) means. I notice other animals seem to follow this crazy capitalisation scheme, such as Blue Whale, but not all, eg Horseshoe crab. What's with this? I guess this debate has occurred before. But dingo (lowercase) makes more sense to me, and the Macquarie Dictionary lists it with a lowercase d too. Thoughts? --Pengo 08:35, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'd suggest that a great many people simply aren't clear on capitalisation in English, and they tend to overcorrect as a result, not just here but in general. Dingo is clearly a common name for a type of dog, and thus shouldn't be capitalised. The only breed names that would be are those with an adjectival portion which is itself based on a proper name - Jack Russell terrier, for instance, or Welsh terrier - and the search for perceived consistency there is probably a big source of the confusion. In some cases the usage seems to have changed to the point where it's simply a variant for of English - Border Collie seems almost never to be written without caps, for instance. (As a side note, treating dingo as a species name would in fact demand that it be lowercase, since species names are never capitalised.) - toh 22:13, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)

This is a subject that has been argued here many, many times over the years. In the dog breeds section, we decided that the convention should be that breed names are capitalised and this consensus has held for a long time now. So it's Border Collie and Welsh Terrier. The dingo is a slightly different case in itself because it is usually regarded as a sub-species rather than a breed - and mammals usually are in the non-capitalised form (unlike, for example, birds - where the agreement on Wikipedia is to capitalise) so this one is down to the conventions of the tree of life wikiproject rather then the dog breeds wikiproject. -- sannse (talk) 12:23, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Backing Sannse up, but also pointing out that another reason the Dingo is a special case is because the ANKC has in fact recognized the Dingo as a breed. Quill 09:00, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yep, I meant to mention that, thanks Quill -- sannse (talk) 11:34, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)