Friend: “I think the analogy is quite clear. You the Australian convert to Orthodox Judaism and Americanism are trying to protect white Americans from their predatory enemies….”
New York Times: “Massacred,” read the banner headline in the local newspaper — just the single word, as if describing an act of war. Below it was a photo of dead penguins and other birds, the latest casualties in Australia’s long history of imported species’ decimating native wildlife.
Foxes killed 180 penguins in that particular episode, in October 2004. But the toll on Middle Island, off Victoria State in southern Australia, kept rising. By 2005, the small island’s penguin population, which had once numbered 800, was below 10.
Today, their numbers are back in the triple digits, and much of the credit has gone to a local chicken farmer known as Swampy Marsh and his strong-willed sheepdogs.
“The powers that be wouldn’t listen to me until it got down to six penguins,” said Mr. Marsh, whose long-unused birth name is Allan. “They were desperate.”
The farmer’s simple solution — deploy a particularly territorial breed of sheepdog to scare the foxes away — became local legend and, in September, the subject of an Australian film, “Oddball,” which fictionalized the story and made a lovable hero of one of the dogs. The strategy is now being tried elsewhere in Victoria, in hopes of protecting other indigenous species from non-native predators.
Dozens of Australian mammal species have gone extinct since European settlers began arriving in the late 18th century, bringing cats, foxes and other predators new to the ecosystem. A recently announced plan to cull millions of feral cats, which the government says prey on more than 100 threatened species, drew new attention to the problem while infuriating some celebrity advocates of animal rights.
Little penguins, the smallest penguin species, were once common along Australia’s southern coast. But when red foxes were imported for sport hunting in the 19th century, they found the tiny, flightless birds to be easy prey. (So did cats and dogs.) The penguins’ colonies on the mainland began disappearing, which is why most are now found on islands.
