Roman Mars

That's around 3,400 miles, cutting across scrublands and desert.

And though the fence didn't effectively keep out rabbits, it did succeed in its second purpose.

Thomas says the fence effectively sealed off nearly a third of the continent as a dingo-free zone.

Australia still spends big money on this fence, $10 million a year funded through state and local governments and a fence tax on sheep and cattle farmers.

The fence interrupts migration patterns and prevents animals from moving around in search of food or water.

Emus, kangaroos, and wallabies all get stuck behind the fence.

Some of these creatures play an important ecological role transporting seeds, and so the fence has impacted plant diversity as well.

I mean, can there really be such a thing as too many kangaroos?

The population of red foxes and feral cats has also gone up in the absence of dingoes, which in turn has driven native Australian species like bilbies and bandicoots to near extinction.

In the desert, on the dingo side of the fence, the land is looser, with dunes that shift in the wind.

It's closer to the way the landscape would have looked before colonization.

Which makes Australia's commitment to the dingo fence a little hard to understand.

It turns out tearing down the dingo fence is a political third rail.

The thing is, the general public hasn't always seen the dingo as this one-of-a-kind Australian animal like the kangaroo or the koala.

In fact, for a long time, people thought dingoes were just regular domestic dogs that had gone wild.

Dingoes are a bit hard to classify.

Experts say they are descendants of a primitive Asian dog that came to Australia either with seafarers or by land bridge somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago.

This has led to some debate about whether or not dingoes should be considered native to Australia.

Dingoes were shaped not only by the Australian landscape, but by the people who lived there.

Before colonization, dingoes had deeply intimate relationships with humans.