When humans take on the role of rescuer they can feel they are giving a dog a better life. I get it. We all think our life is the one to be aspired to.
If you are an outback dog chances are you have developed some pretty good survival strategies. You are probably pretty good at holding on to your resources and keeping others away from them - maybe you have had to, to get enough to survive. But survive you have, and survived so well that you have passed these genes on to your offspring. You may have had to use aggression to get what you want, as resources are scarce.
Your mother might have been stressed because she suffered malnutrition and fearfulness, but she still went on to conceive and carry the pups to full term.
Along come some rescuers and they want you to have a better life. They would like you to have the benefit of health care and a comfy bed. They take you away from your mother, who they sterilise and leave in the community, and they take you and your siblings on a stressful journey to Perth to start a new life. Worse still they take the mother too, and expect her to adapt to a widely different life from the one she has successfully navigated till now.
Unsuspecting dog adopters are thrilled at the honey coloured fur and the street dog look of puppies that seem shy, but not aggressive, and who will surely grow out of that. Dog adopters are not thinking about the fact that maternal stress changes the way the future brain of these dogs responds to stress. They are not thinking that shyness tends towards fearfulness and later aggressive responses, as the dog matures.
Future adopters do not have a clue that they are adopting a dog with inherited traits that make it good for surviving a life in the bush camp, and not so good at negotiating the cafe strip.
Instincts for survival are not the necessary requirement of dogs whose biggest threat is missing out on sofa time.
We now know that the mother's genes and the mother's mother's genes are all playing a role in the future temperament of the dog. This is why it is important to know what the mother felt, and how stressed she was. This is why it is important to not buy from puppy mills or adopt from bitches who have been distressed and in a state of emotional and physical hardship. This is why it is important to select pups from breeders who are selecting for temperament, NOT colour.
It is happening all over the world - In England rescuers bring dogs from the continent to live in England and in Australia dogs are "rescued" from the North of Australia or from Asia. The problem is that the potential adopters are not after an animal with severe anxiety related illness who is a square peg in a round hole - adopters are after a family pet and many of these dogs are never going to be able to fit this bill. They live with ongoing anxiety and aggression with the aim of keeping themselves safe, and their strategies, that would be quite successful in the world they came from, are not acceptable, or safe, in the urban environments into which they have been parachuted.
What would be better would be to give the dogs the health care they need, in the environments they live in, and to neuter all animals so they cannot continue to breed. The communities they come from would benefit from education into the care of the animals that surround them, and those animals, to my mind, would be better to live out their days in the environment they have evolved to be successful in.