Thylacines in Cryptozoology

[Giant Panda]

Tassie devils and the local Aboriginals used to share the same caves, which makes you wonder how dog domestication began. Usually the idea of dog ancestors as scavengers is rejected, because villages did not exist in the Pleistocene to provide a niche for new scavengers round rubbish dumps: but native Tasmanians coexisted with a carnivorous mammal at their living shelters, and presumably the devils were attracted to something like scraps left by man.

It strikes me as improbable that anyone would tolerate/encourage devil feeding behaviour in a place of dwelling. Particularly given your own habit of insisting on references, I remain unconvinced.

Not to mention that none of this is relevant to the thread. Nor is it relevant to how a different culture domesticated dogs for that matter.

 

[oldrover]

and why the devils are not extinct after dogs were finally introduced to Tasmania.

Recent research is starting to point toward general fur trapping, as the most significant cause of extinction in Tasmania, see Haygarth (2017), the final crash 1906-09 coincides with an increase in trapping activity in the highlands after the wherewithal to mass process catches in the field became widespread, the 'skin shed', see Cubit. I can't face ploughing through the bounty records at the moment, but at first site, and I may be wrong, the figures by Paddle (2012) adjusted by Campbell and Sleightholme (2016) do seem to show a spike in bounty payments in 1900-03, the period when these techniques were first employed. Possums were mostly shot, but wallaby were captured in snares, to which the thylacine was also vulnerable. As for the impact of dogs, I've yet to see any decent research on this in Tasmania, Mooney (2014) cited in Campbell and Sleightholme (2016), says that a feral dog population was present, but was largely, as you'd expect, restricted to nearby populated areas. It's only when the highlands open up to mass trapping that the tiger starts to disappear, and very rapidly.

 

[Chlidonias]

Trying to track down specifics: it seems to be Owen and Pemberton, who attribute it to a food taboo among native Tasmanians. Sounds like the devils were an incipient domesticate via a commensal pathway initiated by the animals, one that failed owing to their having an unsociable temperment, so this was probably tolerance of scavenging and nothing else, with their being no use to local people.

I haven't read it (or, more probably, I have but too long ago and don't remember). For everyone else, that bald reference is (presumably) to a 2011 book called Tasmanian Devil: a unique and threatened animal by David Owen and David Pemberton. Throwing out an author's name as a source with no accompanying title or date is pretty lazy and useless.

Without reading the book I have no idea what it says, or where they got their information/ideas from. Saying it "sounds like the devils were an incipient domesticate" - which is presumably your own interpretation of whatever the book says? - sounds like rubbish.

 

[SealPup]

Recent research is starting to point toward general fur trapping, as the most significant cause of extinction in Tasmania, see Haygarth (2017), the final crash 1906-09 coincides with an increase in trapping activity in the highlands after the wherewithal to mass process catches in the field became widespread, the 'skin shed', see Cubit. I can't face ploughing through the bounty records at the moment, but at first site, and I may be wrong, the figures by Paddle (2012) adjusted by Campbell and Sleightholme (2016) do seem to show a spike in bounty payments in 1900-03, the period when these techniques were first employed. Possums were mostly shot, but wallaby were captured in snares, to which the thylacine was also vulnerable. As for the impact of dogs, I've yet to see any decent research on this in Tasmania, Mooney (2014) cited in Campbell and Sleightholme (2016), says that a feral dog population was present, but was largely, as you'd expect, restricted to nearby populated areas. It's only when the highlands open up to mass trapping that the tiger starts to disappear, and very rapidly.

Yes this is a common thing with feral dogs, to prefer human settlements. I was surprised a couple of years ago to read that feral dogs on the Galapagos were the only ones in the world, that do not depend upon man. Though the authors of that paper were obviously omitting dingo-likes, and commenting only on European-descended dogs, it was certainly food for thought. European dogs might not be a good analog for the dingos, because the human cultures they accompanied, had different settlement patterns and land use. (Dingo-isation accompanied a shift in the Aboriginal diet toward smaller game, though Tasmanian people since the Pleistocene, consistently favoured a single species of wallaby.) All the same, knowing dingo-isation hit the thylos and devils on the mainland, means the possible impact of dogs on Tasmanian thylos and devils, needs careful consideration.

Chli: I was referring to the incipient step of the commensal pathway to domestication, in which curious animals initiate contact with man whilst seeking food.

 

[Wendy Symons]

I moved the above few posts here from the Nonsense Thread.

I was just googling to see what this Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia (TAGA) is, to see if it was a spoof group, but it seems to be made of genuine enthusiasts (it seems to be a Facebook group and/or a Youtube Channel). Anyway, one of the first links that came up was the following article which has the Adelaide video, but also a different video from 2008 showing a "thylacine" in Western Victoria which the witness claims was one of several, all of which had stripes. The video very clearly shows a fox (especially right at the start you can plainly see it is a fox), although it has an injured front paw and is hence moving in an unusual way.
‘Extinct’ Tasmanian Tiger caught on camera? (VIDEO)

The video is here on Youtube also:

The one in Western Australia looks like a fox with mange, hence the long hairless tail!