I know it is not a regular dash, and I didn't have a regular dash in my 3 examples above, as it can be seen in the first one with Data Dumper (showing the escape sequence), and also in the second one displaying the warning about wide character.

This is the same example with first one regular dash and then an "irregular" one, using first Data Dumper to show the UTF-8 escape sequence on the irregular dash, and showing what I get with binmode:

$ perl -e '
 use strict;
 use warnings;
 use utf8;
 use Data::Dumper;
 my $data = "regular dash - other type of beast: – abcd";
 print Dumper $data;
 binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
 print "$data";
 '
$VAR1 = "regular dash - other type of beast: \x{2013} abcd";
regular dash - other type of beast: – abcd
[download]

If this does not work for you and it does for me, I would suspect that either your version of Perl is too old (I am using 5.14) or that there is something wrong in your terminal configuration.