The Conversation: Can Australia afford the dingo fence?

The 5500 kilometre long dingo fence is a monument to predator xenophobia and costs millions of dollars annually to maintain, but is it worth it?

It turns out the dingo is a sorely under-utilised weapon in our feral animal arsenal. Pretty much everywhere we’ve looked across Australia, when dingoes are abundant, foxes and cats aren’t, and native marsupials are. It’s called the mesopredator effect, and highlights the important role of predators in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

The dingo fence is a blunt instrument; we can do better. Image [CC-BY-SA-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

After some of our comments to the mainstream media were ignored or taken out of context, Corey Bradshaw and I are setting the record straight on dingoes in Australia and how we choose to manage them.