Other, native, domesticated canids
Mitchell (2017) proposes a theory to explain the slow dynamics of spread of C. familiaris in South America, including the Southern Cone and Chile, after its original arrival across the Bering Strait. He argues that the canids of South America were better adapted to local diseases such as leishmaniasis canina and distemper than C. familiaris, and acted as reservoirs and vectors that led to almost epidemic levels of these diseases in dog populations, limiting their adoption by native peoples. The Andes may also have acted as a barrier to dog migration into Chile. An alternative perspective is developed by Prates (2014), who argues that many societies may have failed to incorporate C. familiaris into their social practices and daily lives if other canids already played roles such as keeping watch, hunting, or companionship. Prates bases this hypothesis on the discovery of a D. avus skeleton at a funerary site of the “Loma de los Muertos” archeological deposit in Río Negro Province, on the southern half of Argentina, dated around 2000-3000 ya (Stahl 2012, 2013; Prates, 2010). This is most probably a deliberate burial. In the context of cosmological systems in many areas of South America in which taming of individual animals is a common practice and a fundamental part of their understanding of social relations between species (Stahl, 1984; Erikson, 2000), this suggests the hypothesis of possible taming of canids in many societies of the continent. It is thus not impossible to imagine that some sort of domestication or taming of native canids by Patagonian hunter-gatherers happened in Chile (Gusinde, 1951; Gallardo, 1910).
C. familiaris was thus not necessarily the only canid either tamed or domesticated by humans. However, further research would be necessary to determine what kinds of relationships may have existed between native canids and humans in Chile, and to what extent this domestication took place, as at present we do not have archeological nor paleontological data to support these hypotheses.