In 1859, Australia began constructing a 3,488 mile long fence, the longest in the world. The fence cuts off the populous, fertile southeastern part of the country, where Melbourne and Sydney are located, from the harsh, arid outback. Why did this happen? We get the answer in the form of a new video from Half as Interesting.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Long fences were originally constructed in western Australia to contend with the continent's terrible rabbit problem. When 24 rabbits were released into the wild in the early 19th century, their population quickly grew--to 600 million. The rabbits began destroying crops, and fences were built to keep them out. This didn't work very well--after all, rabbits are famous for jumping.

Later on, dingoes became a bigger problem. The wild dogs eat everything, from fish to sheep, and were a menace to livestock farmers. Thus, the government spent millions to make the fence bigger and protect the precious fertile land against dingoes. The fence was completed by the mid-20th century.



Incredibly, the fence works. Dingoes are much less common in the southeast in large part because of it, and thus they can't gobble up all the livestock. Meanwhile, the fence costs $10 million a year to maintain--much less than the losses from wild dogs ravaging the countries cows and sheep.

Source: Half as Interesting

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io