The wild dogs were introduced to the country with settlers from what is now Indonesia about 5,000 years ago.

They dominated much of the landscape until sheep farmers erected a “dingo fence” more than 3,000 miles long during the 1880s to keep them away from their flocks in New South Wales and Victoria.

Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings B, Michael Letnic from the University of Sydney says the “dingoes suppress fox and kangaroo numbers, and when you don't have dingoes in the system, kangaroos basically eat all the herbiage and foxes take all of the prey."

He says (inside the fence) where dingoes are absent, native rodents, marsupials and grasses are all diminished.

He calculates that 16 threatened mammals would benefit from the return of dingoes, with only three species being negatively affected.

Photo: File