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This is the longest fence in the world running across Australia.
Being born on the wrong side of it is a death sentence for this animal.
The dingo.
Farmers want to kill it and conservationists want to save it.
Now the fence built to keep dingoes out may provide the proof
that Australia's eco system is better off with the dingoes in.
It's called the dingo or dog fence.
You can see it on satellite images.
An enormous wire barrier that stretches more than 5600 kilometres
across Australia's vast landscape,
passing through South Australia along a section of the New South Wales border
and into Queensland.
It divides most of Australia's arid lands from the fertile grazing area,
which makes up only about one third of the continent's landmass.
And it determines whether dingoes will live or die.
On one side of the fence,
dingoes are a protected native species free to roam at will.
On the other side, they're considered pests to be persecuted and poisoned.
To understand why, we have to go back in time.
The dog fence was first erected in 1885.
It took five years to build.
Originally, it was intended to stop the rabbit plague
from spreading across state borders.
At that time, millions of rabbits were breeding
and eating their way around the country.
But the fence proved to be a wasted effort and soon became dilapidated.
It stayed that way until the early 1900s,
when more and more sheep farms were being established.
The fence was fixed and gained a new purpose:
to protect flocks of sheep by keeping out hungry dingoes.
The maintenance of the fence has become a costly undertaking,
Millions of dollars are invested every year to keep it in working order.
There are even plans to extend it in some areas.
It might sound crazy, but it's a worthwhile sacrifice
because the sheep and cattle industries are valued at billions of dollars.
The annual cost of maintaining the fence is around 8 million U.S.$.
But this is vastly outweighed by the 3 billion $ brought in by lamb exports
and 8 billion $ earned from beef exports every year.
The fence has helped reduce losses of sheep to predators,
but livestock continues to be killed.
Dingoes still live and breed in the fertile country,
and young ones will sometimes crawl through holes in the fence.
This is a map of Australia's livestock and dingo distribution.
Here are the sheep, primarily in the fertile grazing areas.
And there you have the cattle, mainly in the arid zones.
The white striped sections show
where most of the dingoes live without persecution
and the red stripe sections where they are threatened
by high levels of lethal control.
In Queensland, sheep numbers have decreased by 70% since the early 1990s
and by 40% across the rest of the country.
The figures are at a 100 year low.
The decline is due to more than just predators.
There are economic and climatic factors at work, too.
Droughts and bushfires are increasing in Australia.
But for farmers on the front line, the dingo is the main culprit.
For a dingo, being born on the wrong side of the fence is a death sentence
and a license to ignore its status as a unique Australian species.
Where sheep and cattle graze, dingoes are classed as wild dogs,
a group with feral domestic dogs and dingo dog hybrids.
And here, all wild dogs are subject to lethal control.
This persecution has led to the dingo being listed as vulnerable to extinction.
But recently, conservationists and researchers have brought new momentum
to the conflict between dingo control and dingo conservation.
They say that if scientific facts about the dingo were taken into consideration,
management practices could be put in place
that would keep livestock safe and save the dingo.
But what are these facts?
Where did dingoes come from?
Are they dangerous feral dogs or native animals?
And how do they impact Australia's wild environments?
Some of the latest evidence about their origins suggests
that dingoes arrived with hunter gatherers from Borneo and Sulawesi
between 5000 and 12000 years ago.
They haven't been in Australia for as long as other endemic species,
but they have managed to adapt to Australia's harsh environments
and learned to hunt its strange fauna like the giant, flightless emu.
Some scientists say the dingo is a species in its own right.
Like other truly wild canids, it displays unique behaviors.
Dingoes tend to howl rather than bark.
And they only breed once a year in autumn or early winter.
A recently published study examined 5000 genetic samples from wild dogs
and found that 99% of the animals were either pure or mostly dingo.
And one more scientific fact shines a new light on dingoes.
They might even be as essential to restoring the ecosystem
as wolves have been to rewilding Yellowstone National Park in the USA.
Protecting them could benefit the environment
and aid recovery from the devastating fires.
Scientists of the University of Sydney found evidence of this
by conducting an experiment on the fence built to keep the dingoes out.
Using satellite images taken over 32 years,
they monitored the environmental effects of a section of the fence.
They found that there was more vegetation on the side
where dingoes are protected and plentiful
compared to the side where they are not.
The reason: dingoes control kangaroo populations.
Kangaroos are grass eaters.
By reducing their numbers, the soils will be healthier
and more vegetation is able to grow,
which in turn provides habitats and protection for small native mammals,
many of which are endangered.
The dingo also kills introduced species like cats and foxes.
These feral creatures are responsible for the deaths
of millions of Australian animals every year.
It's a critical interaction to consider
because Australia doesn't just hold the world record for the longest fence,
but also for the highest extinction rate among mammals over the last 200 years.
So, the dingo is a unique Australian animal,
a wild canid and an apex predator
essential for the health of Australia's ecosystem.
But will this knowledge help to save it?
For now, most farmers continue to loathe the animals
because dingoes do kill livestock.
But killing dingoes may be making the situation worse.
It changes pack behavior.
When older dogs are killed, the pack structure collapses.
Young dogs that have no adults to teach them how to hunt properly
will attack and kill indiscriminately.
Is there any hope that the fence which divides both dingoes and Australian opinion
will ever come down?
Attitudes are changing.
Farmers are finding new ways to overcome the problem
by keeping donkeys with their sheep and cattle.
The donkeys become protectors.
When dingoes threaten the herd,
they scare them off with their braying and aggressive behaviour.
And some cattle farmers have found that if they don't kill dingoes,
the kangaroos are kept under control and their herds have more grass to eat.
Conflict between humans and wildlife is a universal story.
It's complex with lives and livelihoods at stake.
Can dingoes and humans coexist in Australia?
The fence once built to protect farmers herds may offer the best evidence yet
that the dingo deserves a second chance.
Wildlife protection and conservation is the topic
that we hold dearest here at Terra Mater.
Which is why our mind was blown
when we found out about the courageous women
on the frontline against poaching in Breaking their Silence.
This film by the award-winning filmmaker Cary David,
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