As a young regional reporter in Western Australia some years ago, I enthusiastically sounded the alarm about ‘wild dogs’ attacking faraway places in the desert interior. The hybrid offspring of dingoes and feral dogs had bred to ‘plague proportions’ in their remote strongholds and were now returning, nosing through gaps in fences, invading run-down and defenceless farming districts, mining camps, and rail depots. Concerned landholders, the line crackling with distance, described an elusive beast of endless hunger, cruel and cunning, haunting the margins of our world. It was beautiful, the stuff of science fiction or fantasy. The stories were picked up and reprinted by our parent newspaper in the city; an urban public apparently shared our concerns about murderous feral carnivores. All that year, while reporting on them, I never saw a wild dog.