Troughton considered that they were the same as ‘dingo-like’ dogs reported decades earlier from “7,000 ft. on Mount Scratchley” in the Owen Stanley Range.

Skins and skulls of Mount Scratchley dogs, held by the Queensland Museum had been described by de Vis (in 1911), Longman (1928) and WoodJones (1929).

Troughton agreed with WoodJones’ opinion that the ‘Papuan dog’ was ”a very definite race … differing widely in its characters from the dogs of certain other Pacific islands”.

In a later paper Troughton reinforced his opinion that the dog he had described was a primitive, wild-living species and insisted that use of the term ‘feral’ for this New Guinea dog was incorrect.

Troughton’s accounts of New Guinea dogs have provided historical props for assertions that a distinctive form of wild dog - variously named New Guinea Singing Dog, New Guinea Highland Wild Dog, New Guinea Dingo and, in earlier years, New Guinea Yodelling Dog - is present at scattered high altitude locations of mainland New Guinea, isolated from places where people live and, hence, largely isolated from the village dogs associated with those people.

On two counts, this opinion remains controversial.

Firstly, disagreement concerning the taxonomic status of the New Guinea Singing Dog with some authors accepting the name Canis hallstromi and others treating it, together with the Australian dingo, as Canis familiaris.

Secondly, disagreement concerning the provenance of the founding members of the captive population as wild-living or village-living, and their status as wild, feral or domestic. Koler-Matznick wrote that the “current captive singing dog population is descended from eight specimens not directly caught in the wild” and then commented that “this does not mean, however, that these specimens were village C familiaris”.

Recent genetic studies, however, using samples from the captive population, treat those dogs as descendants of wild-living forebears and, in direct contradiction to Koler-Matznick, Cairns in 2021 asserted that most of the captive New Guinea Singing Dog population was “founded by 8 individuals captured from the wild in 1950”.

Misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the historical record continue to the present time due, in part, to earlier errors and flawed assumptions being later accepted as fact.

In this paper we direct attention to errors of both fact and interpretation in accounts of the New Guinea Singing Dog with particular emphasis upon details of the provenance of specimens that were taken to be diagnostic of C.hallstromi by Troughton in 1957.

We show that the presumed status as wild animals, or as descendants from wild animals, of the founding members of the captive population of New Guinea Singing Dog is incorrect in some cases and in doubt for others.

We reinforce an earlier argument that, at the time of European colonisation of New Guinea, high-altitude wild-living dogs and most village-living dogs, as proposed by the writers in 2016, “comprised a single though heterogeneous gene pool”.

We suggest that studies of village-living dogs throughout remote areas of New Guinea offer an opportunity to learn about what was once a pan-New Guinean population of an unusual, and archaic, form of domestic dog.

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Audio recordings from the USA population of captive New Guinea Singing Dogs are publicly accessible through You Tube: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxV1wbBrfU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt6-gygNcaw

We know of only one publicly available audio recording of wild-living dogs in New Guinea. This is from Puncak Jaya, Papua Province, Indonesia, in an Antiga Films documentary from 2020: 'Highland Wild Dog Story' with James 'Mac' McIntyre:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9k3yt_9aog&t=90s

We have recently completed Part I of a collation of items about dogs in New Guinea from the 1600s to the present day:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358165271

It includes quite a lot of quotes from patrol reports, PNG Attitude and Phil Fitzpatrick's book, Bamahuta: Leaving Papua.

Part II will be finished soon, and will include several embedded audio recordings of dogs from the Nomad District in Western Province.