This video was made possible by Squarespace. Build your beautiful website for 10% off over
at Squarespace.com/HAI. As we all know, Australians are terrible people.
They’re hell-bent on exclusionary policies that keep these cute little guys away from
the south-east all because, well I actually don’t know why. I should look it up.
Huh. Ok so as it turns out dingos suck and Australians are alright. In summary, these
beasts eat sheep and make them deceased so increased police and this fence kept them
from the south-east and help decrease the feast, capisce? Good, now to unsummarize.
Dingos are like dogs, but worse. Instead of eating Purina they’ll eat anything—kangaroo,
rats, cows, wallaby, sheep, fish, etc—and that’s a problem because farmers like their
sheep and cows alive. Dingo attacks on humans, while rare, have also happened. In the most
notable case, a two month old baby girl was taken from her tent by Dingoes and killed
while she and her parents were camping at Ayers Rock. The mother of the girl was tried
and convicted for murder and spent more than three years in prison before it was proven
that dingoes killed the girl. She was released and given $1.5 million in compensation which
sounds nice, except her legal expenses amounted to over $4 million, so she wasn’t happy.
But that case really had nothing to do with the building of the dingo fence because this
fence was built in the 1800’s. What you have to remember about Australia is that almost
everyone lives here. In fact, only 18% of the population lives in the Northern Territory,
West Australia, or Southern Australia even though these regions account for 63% of the
area of the country. Now, a big reason so much of the population lives in the south-east
is because it’s the most fertile area and since sheep eat wheat in the south-east…
I’m just kidding we’re not doing this again. Because this area is more fertile this
region is where most farms are and as we learned earlier dingoes plus animals equals just dingoes
because they eat everything, and just as an only somewhat related side-note, there’s
a cattle farm in Australia that’s larger than the country of Belize.
Moving on, in order to separate the fertile, populated area of Australia from the dry,
deadly animal region of Australia the government built a 3,488 mile long fence. Now, this
fence didn’t even start as an anti-dingo fence, it was originally for rabbits. In 1859,
24 rabbits were released into the wild in Australia by Thomas Austin—a guy whose only
legacy is doing exactly this. From those 24 the population of these crop-eating demons
grew to 600 million and so the first wave of fence building was all centered around
creating rabbit free areas where settlers could grow food. As you may know, Australia
has had a long and respected history of fighting animals which came to a climax when they literally
had a war, like with guns and soldiers and all that, they literally had a war with emus.
With the rabbits, although, as it turned out the fence pretty much sucked at controlling
them—something about them being able to jump or something—but as dingoes grew in
population and got more destructive the government decided they needed to protect the farmland
and spent millions and millions of dollars to make the fence bigger.
Now to address the elephant in the room. I know all of you are waiting for a Donald Trump
wall joke, and you’re not getting it. Now, the fence was built in sections at different
times but by the mid-1900s it was complete, and this fence is immense. It stretches 3,488
miles long—that’s longer than two football fields—and six feet high, and it’s continuous.
It spans from South Australia all the way to about 100 miles west of Brisbane, and it
does a decently good job of keeping the dingoes out. If you overlay the density of dingoes
you can see that they’re significantly less common in the south-east and so the fence
sort-of works. As crazy of a concept the fence is, it is economically sound. The fence costs
about $10 million yearly to maintain while increased dingo attacks on livestock in the
south-east would cost many times more than that. As crazy as it is, it actually is a
good deal… but what’s also a good deal is Squarespace.
For most businesses, you want people to find you, and the way people find businesses is
the same way you find businesses, you google them. Whether you run a company, a youtube
channel, a podcast, or anything else, you want your first impression to count and Squarespace
is the expert in exactly that because their beautiful designer templates and customizable
templates help you make a website that you can be proud of. Whether it’s a dingo fence
or a website, when making a decision you have to figure out if the benefits outweigh the
costs and, overwhelmingly, they do with a Squarespace site especially since you can
get started today with 10% off over at squarespace.com/HAI.