lordmongrove
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- May 30, 2009
- Messages
- 4,934
Have you been out there? I have, several times. The west of the Island is wilderness, some of the the most remote i've seen. The human population of the Island is less than half a million and they are mostly in the two major cities. The Tasmanian wolf's closest relation, the Tasmania devil has been studied closely in recent years, especially the genetics. This is due to devil facial tumour. a horrific disease which is essentially, transmitable cancer. It seems that the devil populaton can recover from very, very low numbers. It's quite possible that the closely realated Tasmanian wolf is the same. I've spoken to witnesses such as government licence shooters and former loggers who have seen thylacines. None of these people have axes to grin and most want the locations kept secret. I've also seen a sequence of film that shoes a stiff tailed, striped, dog shaped animal moving from beside a tree into the bush. Another odd thing that happened to me deep in the Tasmanian forest was a very strange smell. Old thylacine hunters, zookeepers and animal dealers who had experience with the animals and who were interviewed when they were still alive agreed that the Tasmanian wolf smelled very like a hyena. I used to be a zookeeper myself and i know the smell of a hyena. In 2016 i was following a trail through a remote forest in Tasmania when that smell hit me. It was if the animal had crossed the path shortly before and left the odour. The smell was very localized and was absent when i later returned. I can't say that was a thylacine but it was strange that a hyena-like smell was left behind by something in a Tasmanian forest.Anecdotes and fuzzy pictures constitute "a good chance"? I strongly disagree. That's very wishful thinking when one considers the need for a certain number of individuals to sustain the population these past 100 years, the fact that they were long extinct on mainland Australia by thousands of years and declining in Tasmania when the colonists arrived. I'd say it's an extreme view to say they are still around. False hope (and perhaps deep feelings of guilt) aren't going to bring it back. Maybe cloning will but not for a while and not really. The population is gone.