Foxes may be cute, but they can have a devastating effect on local wildlife. Indeed, they nearly wiped out a colony of little penguins from Middle Island, a beautiful, rugged island off the coast of southern Victoria, Australia.
The catastrophe was averted when an Australian farmer came up with an ingenious way to protect the world’s smallest penguins: send in dogs to protect them.
Before the foxes, there used to be hundreds of fairy penguins, as they were originally called, on Middle Island. Almost overnight, the entire population of the 30cm-tall penguins was wiped out.
“We went from a point where we had around 800 penguins down to where we could only find four,” Peter Abbott from the Penguin Preservation Project told the BBC.
“In our biggest bird kill, we found 360 birds killed over about two nights. Foxes are thrill killers. They’ll kill anything they can find.”
Enter chicken farmer Swampy Marsh who suggested sending one of his Maremma dogs to protect the birds.
“In Australia those dogs are generally used for chicken protection or goats or sheep,” says Abbott.
The first dog, Oddball, made such an impact that he’s the inspiration for a new hit film of the same name. Since Oddball and his friends were introduced on the island 10 years ago, there has not been a single penguin killed by a fox on Middle Island.
“We immediately saw a change in the pattern of the foxes,” says Abbott.
“Leading up to when the dog went on the island, every morning we’d find fox prints on the beach. Putting a dog on the island changed the hierarchy. The foxes can hear the dogs barking, they can smell them so they go somewhere else.”
The fairy penguin population has now gone back up to almost 200.
Oddball the movie has already taken around $11m Australian dollars ($8m; £5.3m) at the box office in Australia and is now heading for global audiences. Watch out for it at a cinema near you!