Roman Mars

Rabbits can't climb very easily.

They hop, but not particularly high.

And so the idea was that they would stop the rabbits with a fence.

But around this time, another European animal was taking over Australia.

And soon, all those rusty rabbit fences would be given a new purpose.

And over time, the little white dots multiplied.

By 1880, there were 100 million sheep in Australia, nearly 50 times the number of people.

World War I cemented wool as the foundation of the Australian economy.

But as the industry continued to grow, farmers needed more land for grazing.

And so they started to breed sheep that could survive in the super dry, marginal regions of the continent.

And it was there that the economic superstar of Australia, the sheep, met its great adversary, the dingo.

For dingoes, the expansion of sheep into the interior was like a free buffet.

Because of the size of the flocks and their remote locations, it wasn't a simple problem to fix.

Farmers wanted to completely eliminate this threat.

And because the wool industry was so politically powerful, they got their wish.

Australia went to war with the dingo.

And then, after World War II, Australia ramped up its assault.

A newspaper headline from 1946 read, D-Day for Dingos, above an article describing a plan to drop over 300,000 poisonous dingo baits across the landscape.

But at the same time they were slaughtering these animals, the wool industry was developing a different strategy, a plan to keep dingoes and sheep permanently separate.

They would take all of those defunct rabbit fences and use them for dingoes instead.