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The wallet was found by a council worker on Friday,
and sure enough, it bore incriminating bite marks. Mr. Dunmore's money was
inside, untouched.
The man said that last month no one
believed his story. "They just laughed," he said. "They thought I'd gone mad.
Now
I have the evidence to prove what happened ... My credit cards even have bite marks in them."
According to Mr. Dunmore, dingoes don't take
Visa or MasterCard. (Photo: Nature
Gallery)
This weekend, the victim told his tale to
The
Sunday Mail, confident now that he has the proof to back
it up: "I was working about 100m from my bag. When I came back
... I found my grapes in a trench about a meter away and my apple beside
the bag with bite marks in it.
"At first I thought someone had taken it [the wallet], but I was
in the middle of the bush.
"About five minutes later, I saw the dingo still hanging
around."
In retrospect, Mr. Dunmore realizes that the
crafty dog had been observing him and carefully planning the heist for a while. "I saw
the dingo hanging around," he recalls. "It
even poked its head in the open window of my work car."
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The dingo (Canis lupus dingo), or "wild dog of down
under", is believed to have arrived on the Australian continent more
than 3,500 years ago, brought by Asian traders. For ages afterward, the
dingo was to be camp companion to the land's indigenous people, the Aborigines.
According to native myth, what we call the Pleiades constellation
(Seven Sisters) is actually a flock of kangaroos being chased by Orion's
two dingoes (for a not-so-accurate lesson in canine astronomy, read The Scoop
Nov. 11 article "Never
Stick Your Head in a Bear's Mouth Unless Your Dog is Nearby").
The advent of the sheep industry in the early 19th century caused a disruption in the wild dog's natural
habits. Suddenly a new, convenient food source presented itself to
the species, and numbers of sheep-snatching dingoes ballooned. As Roland
Breckwoldt,
author of A Very Elegant Animal: The Dingo, writes: "The dingo
started out as a quiet observer but soon came to represent everything that
was dark and dangerous on the continent."
Sheep
farmers fought back by poisoning, shooting and eventually constructing the
longest fence in the world, a 5ft. high, wire barrier called "Dog
Fence" that stretches 3,307mi (5321km) across the continent,
separating sheep from dogs. Today, dingoes are legally classified as
vermin, carrying a bounty of $20 AUS ($11 USD) a head. Dingoes
caught inside the fence (to the southeast) can fetch a reward of up to
$500.
There's no telling how much a dingo wanted for committing robbery is worth.
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