Australia, in the late 1800s, introduced foxes for a hunting hobby, and scientists are still tracking the damage more than a century later

Australia introduced foxes in the 1800s for sport hunting, and the animals later became a major threat to native wildlife. The country is still dealing with the fallout. According to ecologists Sean Tomlinson and Damien Fordham, writing in The Conversation, European red foxes deliberately released at three Victorian sites in 1870, Werribee, Corio near Geelong, and Ballarat, expanded rapidly through southeastern Australia before spreading north and west, filling their potential range across most of the continent within about 60 years.

A hunting trend that got out of hand
Red foxes are not from Australia. British settlers brought them to Australia on purpose. They mostly released them around Melbourne. They did this to continue the tradition of fox hunting on their new properties. They thought it would be a fun weekend activity and treated it as a sporting pastime. They hunted with dogs and horses at sunrise.

Almost nobody considered what a clever, adaptable predator could do to animals that had never been hunted by a land predator before.


This turned out to be a mistake. Local animals like mammals and birds did not know how to run or hide from something that looked like a fox. This was because they had never lived alongside an animal like a fox before. That made them easy prey.

From a few paddocks to an entire continent
The expansion was startling in its speed. By tracing historical sighting records, researchers found that red foxes spread from a handful of release points in Victoria to the Pilbara region of Western Australia in about six decades. Today, they occupy roughly 80 percent of the continent, largely absent only from the tropical north and the island state of Tasmania.

Why local wildlife never stood a chance
This is where a colonial-era mistake became a long-running ecological crisis. The study, ‘The impacts and management of foxes Vulpes vulpes in Australia’, published in Mammal Review, found that threatened species could only be successfully reintroduced to their former habitats once fox numbers were brought under control. Their review of multiple field experiments concluded that foxes are a major driver of native fauna declines, mainly through direct predation, with competition and disease playing smaller roles.

The paper adds that fox predation on lambs can reach 1–30% in agricultural landscapes, with losses varying by flock size, flock health, lambing timing, and fox density. It also notes that broad-scale control is often necessary: several replicated removal experiments found foxes to be the major agents of native fauna extirpation, and management on offshore islands has been especially important for protecting threatened mammals.

The impact has been severe. Several species of bettongs and bandicoots have declined sharply because of foxes, and the desert rat-kangaroo was wiped out entirely. Even sheep farmers are affected, since fox predation on lambs can reduce a season's flock by a meaningful amount.

Ground-nesting birds pay a price, too
Mammals weren't the only ones caught off guard. Birds that build their nests on the ground, rather than up in the trees, turned out to be especially exposed, since a fox can simply stroll over and help itself to the eggs. New South Wales' Department of Planning and Environment reports that foxes have driven four ground-nesting bird species to local extinction in the western part of the state alone, with several others still sliding downward.

The malleefowl, a bird known for building enormous nesting mounds out of soil and leaf litter, has suffered more than most, simply because its eggs and chicks sit right at ground level, exactly where a fox goes looking for its next meal.

Can Australia turn things around
Wildlife agencies now lean on a combination of trapping, exclusion fencing, and baiting programs to keep fox numbers in check. None of these methods fully solves the problem, but coordinated, large-scale efforts can help struggling species recover. Predator-proof reserves and offshore islands, where foxes have never set a paw, remain some of the last safe havens for Australia's most vulnerable animals.

What began as a hunting hobby in the 1870s grew into one of Australia's most stubborn conservation challenges. More than a century later, the cleanup still isn't finished.