Johnny Depp’s wife, Amber Heard, and their dogs have been in hot water with the Australian government. The actress was charged with illegally bringing the couple’s two Yorkshire terriers into the country and producing false documents after Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce accused Depp of smuggling the pairs’ pooches in on his private jet. His ultimatum: get the dogs out, or we’ll euthanize them. While it may seem that Joyce is being a bit “I’ll get you and your little dogs too” a la the Wicked Witch of the West, he’s actually quite justified in his hard-nosed approach. The Depps’ dogs aren’t Toto, Australia definitely isn’t Kansas, and the land called Oz has had a major problem with unwanted visitors.
After breaking away from the supercontinent Gondwana, and then Antartica, Australia spent 50 million years in isolation, making it a bit of an evolutionary cul-de-sac.. As a result, the Australian ecosystem—which contains a large number of plants and animals not found anywhere else on Earth—doesn’t deal very well with animals that aren’t a product of that evolution. The country has a problem with a number of invasive species; although the two most iconic ones are cane toads and rabbits, they also have problems with cats, foxes, pigs, and even camels and ostriches. “Plague ostriches is not something you hear about very often, but it is a thing in Australia,” says Nicholas G. Evans, an Australian postdoctoral fellow in advanced biomedical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

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