The mysterious, extinct ‘Fuegian dog’ was actually a semi-tame fox

A strange and mysterious extinct dog breed from far southern South America might not have been a dog at all. 

The “Fuegian dogs” that lived with the Indigenous peoples of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago were semi-tame culpeos, foxlike animals native to South America, researchers report. The study, published July 14 in the Journal of Zoology, highlights how humans have repeatedly allied with canids. 

Fuegian dogs lived alongside the Yámana and Selkʼnam people for probably thousands of years, but the first historical accounts of these creatures came from European visitors to the region in the 18th century. The dogs were described as terrierlike and often a monochromatic grayish-tan with bushy tails.

But the biological identity of these dogs was murky. Following the colonization of the Chilean and Argentinian regions of Tierra del Fuego by Europeans and the systematic decimation of Indigenous communities, the Fuegian dogs vanished by the early 20th century, leaving behind only historical accounts, illustrations and a couple of museum specimens.

William Franklin, a wildlife ecologist at Iowa State University in Ames, was studying how the wild ancestors of llamas reached Tierra del Fuego when he became fascinated by the archipelago’s enigmatic canines and the little that was known about them.

Franklin delved into historical artwork, written accounts, archaeological and genetic data as well as details on how the region’s Indigenous people talked about the canines. 

European accounts from the 1800s usually described the dogs as foxlike: sharp-nosed and lacking the spots and patches common in domesticated dogs. 

“There is no [archaeological] evidence to date that there were dogs in the Americas that far south” prior to European colonization, says Erica Hill, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, who was not involved with the research. 

Franklin notes that the most southerly remains belonging to a dog — dated about 870 years ago — are still 1,000 kilometers north of Tierra del Fuego. 

Fuegian dogs were characterized by a mercurial temperament: ill-mannered but willing to curl up and rest alongside humans. Those that were shipped to England reportedly had an innate wildness and couldn’t be kept from attacking and killing poultry and piglets. Together, none of this suggests that the animals were typical domesticated dogs, Franklin argues. 

Indeed, a 2013 genetic study on a putative Fuegian dog specimen housed in a museum in Tierra del Fuego found it matched the foxlike culpeo (Lycalopex culpaeus).

The compiled evidence, Franklin says, suggests a population of culpeos lived with the Yámana and Selkʼnam people. But these were no domesticated foxes either, he says. Rather, they were something like semi-tame allies in a mutually beneficial partnership with humans, who benefitted from them as hunting aids but had a less dependable relationship than dogs. Multiple accounts describe the foxes capturing otters. The foxes were also employed in fishing, where they would corral schools of fish so their human partners could more easily net them.

Hill cautions against thinking of these animals as pets. “A luxury good that lives in your house and eats your food and sits on your lap — that kind of pet is a relatively recent phenomenon.”

Rather, most Indigenous societies in the Americas practiced a partnership model between canids and people, as seen in working animals such as sled dogs. That bond may have helped people survive on Tierra del Fuego, much like human–sled dog relationships have been crucial in the Arctic, Hill says. The cultural importance of the foxes shines in the Yámana oral history and language, the latter of which has about 160 phrases pertaining to the animals.

Later depictions of the Fuegian dogs seemed more and more doglike, suggesting that as European dogs spread in the region, they replaced the foxes.

Fabián Jaksic, an ecologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, says the findings align with his own thoughts on the Fuegian “dogs.” Though he thinks the animals may represent two different species: culpeos brought to the island by Indigenous people who partially tamed them, and true dogs associated with the inhabitants of the southern archipelago.

Human-fox relationships may have developed independently around the world. For instance, in Europe, red foxes have been tagging along with humans for over 40,000 years.

“The fact that such a development also occurred in South America doesn’t come as a surprise to me,” says Chris Baumann, a paleoecologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who coauthored the red fox study. 

Researchers have also discovered red foxes buried in Israel around 16,500 years ago, suggesting they were companion animals there, too.

Hill suggests that a wider range of relationships between humans and canids may have existed in the past, supported by our shared flexibility in habitat and diet.

Franklin says, “This [phenomenon] occurred in cultures that didn’t have wolves in their geography. So, they used foxes.”