Cut from history
An abandoned Tasmanian zoo tells the haunting tale of an ending
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A pair of thylacines kept at the private zoo of Mrs. Mary Grant Roberts, Beaumaris, Hobart, Tasmania. The photo was taken sometime before 1921. Photo courtesy of The Thylacine Museum |
It is deep-to-the-bone chilling to know the exact date a species disappeared from Earth. It is even more ghastly to look upon the place where it happened and know that nobody knew or cared at the time what had transpired and why.
It was a damp, gray Tasmanian winter afternoon when I stared through the locked gate and fence surrounding what once was the Beaumaris Zoo in the capital city, Hobart. Here in the sprawling park known as Queens Domain, little remains to memorialize a deliberate environmental disaster.
For 14 years, the zoo had “introduced a wide range of exotic and native fauna to the curious and inquisitive people of Hobart,” as a marker on the high gate advises the occasional passer-by. As for the extinction of the thylacine, what had been Australia’s largest carnivorous marsupial merits only a few lines of type, an etching and a childlike metal caricature.
Once the location of a 19th-century sandstone quarry worked by prisoners transported as punishment from England to Australia, the zoo site is now rough weed-covered ground. Its hourglass-shaped concrete duck pond is drained of water and layered with debris. A gray toilet block withstands the weather.
And there, beyond the toilet block, is the cage where the world’s last known thylacine died. Its name: Benjamin, although it’s believed to have been female. The date: Sept. 7, 1936, only months after the Tasmanian government bestowed belated legal protection on the species.
Too little by far, too late by far for Benjamin, which thus became what scientists call an endling, the last survivor of a species.
Endling. A word with finality.
As for Beaumaris Zoo, it closed 14 months after the last thylacine died, a victim of declining attendance and the economic downturn of the Great Depression.
The Thylacine Doomed
The thylacine—or Tasmanian tiger—was a striped marsupial that looked canine or lupine but was related to neither dog nor wolf. A century earlier, not long after the first published report in 1805 of a “strange animal” discovered on the island, it was labeled a “menace” with a bounty on its head out of an ill-founded fear that it would decimate sheep herds on the island.
It had once roamed the mainland. At Ubirr in Kakadu National Park near the far north—the Top End—of the continent, we still see an Aboriginal painting of a thylacine, its stripes clearly visible high on a rock face, a reminder that once this animal lived and bred and died oh-so-far from the island of Tasmania that gave it its nickname. Rock paintings from the Kimberly area of Western Australia also depict the thylacine, further evidence of its once-sprawling range.
As a species, the thylacine had rolled a long way downhill before Benjamin slammed into the wall of extinction at the Beaumaris Zoo. Its disappearance from the mainland several thousand years ago is generally blamed on the dingo, a relative of the dog that had been introduced earlier to the continent but never reached Tasmania.
But it was the Europeans and their descendants in Tasmania who bear the blame for its total disappearance from the Earth, they with their guns and their traps and their poisons that decimated a population weakened by disease.
An endling.
A Question of Values
Although the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania had used thylacines for food before they themselves were massacred and driven off the island, the settlers considered the animals “bloody useless things—until 1914. Black-and-white photographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries show proud hunters posed with their kills. Eerie film footage shows several animals in captivity, unthreatening as they pace in their cages. Bloody useless.
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| Photo courtesy of The Thylacine Museum |
Useless is, of course, in the mind of the beholder, much as sheep ranchers in the western United States considered coyotes and wolves useless—or worst. As the agrarian philosopher and essayist Wendell Berry wrote:
“The fact is, people need both coyotes and sheep, need a world in which both kinds of life are possible. Outside the heat of conflict, conservationists probably know that a sheep is one of the best devices for making coarse foliage humanly edible and that wool is ecologically better than synthetic fibers, just as most shepherds will be aware that wild nature is of value to them and not lacking in interest and pleasure.
The usefulness of coyotes is, of course, much harder to define than the usefulness of sheep. Coyote fur is not a likely substitute for wool and, except as a last resort, most people don’t want to eat coyotes. The difficulty lies in the difference between what is directly useful. Coyotes are useful indirectly, as part of the health of nature, from which we and our sheep alike must live and take our health. The fact, moreover, may be that sheep and coyotes need each other, at least in the sense that neither would prosper in a place totally unfit for the other.”
How do we make such judgments? How do we set values? Often wrongly, as the thylacine’s fate shows.
From Vermin to Icon
Over the six-plus decades since Benjamin’s lonely death, the thylacine has metamorphosed from “vermin to icon,” as an exhibit at the Australian National Museum in Canberra puts it. But it’s more than an icon gracing the label of brewed-in-Tasmania Cascade beer. It is simultaneously an icon for the belief among some diehards that the thylacine survives, somehow, somewhere in the remoteness of Australia.
A well-respected 1996 field guide to Australian mammals by Barbara Trigg concedes that the thylacine is “probably extinct on the mainland” but adds that there “may still be a small number in forest areas in Tasmania.” Just in case, her guidebook describes the shape and size of its paw prints.
Survivors? Benjamin not an endling after all?
Formal and informal expeditions since 1938 have failed to produce proof of any survivors, although as late as 1945 a five-member search team reported “possible tracks.” A display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart bluntly records the findings of search after search sponsored by the likes of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team and the National Parks and Wildlife Service: “No Tiger.” “No Tiger.” “No Tiger.”
A hidden, vestigial population whose existence could reverse natural history? That’s “wishful thinking,” insists biologist Tim Low, who has reviewed and rejected unsubstantiated reports of sightings on Tasmania and the mainland. Wishful.
Resurrection by Science?
If intrepid thylacine buffs fail in their mission of rediscovery, however, can science return the thylacine to Earth, ending its endling status through the test tube?
Scientists associated with the Australian Museum in Sydney contend that DNA, including that from a 6-month-old joey preserved in alcohol since 1866 and DNA from bones and teeth, may enable them to clone the thylacine. “It’s a very long shot,” admits Don Colgan, the museum’s evolutionary biologist, who estimates the odds at “8 percent at best” and the time frame at 20 to 25 years.
Among the countless extinct species, why choose the thylacine to clone?
As the only species in its marsupial family, deliberately wiping out the thylacine was as much a war crime in biological terms as eradicating all members of the cat family at one time, Colgan explains. “In terms of the evolutionary history and evolutionary potential, it represents an ideal species” for resurrection. And if scientists must decide which species to work with, genetic importance is one of the criteria they must look at.
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Though a marsupial, the thylacine's canine look led many to label the animal a "menace," fearing it would decimate sheep herds on the island. Photo courtesy of The Thylacine Museum |
There’s been plenty of press coverage, at home and internationally, since the museum proposed the cloning project, and the story has drawn television crews from as far away at Chile, Germany and Japan.
The prospect of cloning would raise vocal political and ethical concerns—even protests—in the United States but there hasn’t been much audible or visible opposition in Australia. For American scientists, a project like this would engender showboating and preemptive legislation from politicians, vituperative phone calls to radio talk shows and picketing outside laboratories and research centers. Not so in Australia.
In that sense, Colgan is fortunate in that he doesn’t have to worry much about ethical objections. What about critics who argue that scientists shouldn’t play God? He shakes his head and says, “I don’t know what that means. It’s never been explained to me.” He’s a religious man but “this is not anything I’ve prayed about.”
And the museum’s director and point man with the media, Michael Archer, says bluntly, “My response is that people played God when we exterminated the animal in the first place.”
Not the First, Nor Likely the Last
The thylacine was not the first endling for post-settlement Australia—that was the destiny of the paradise parrot, which nested in termite mounds throughout Queensland but had the ill fortune to bear brightly colored feathers that were in high demand. Its last confirmed sighting came in 1927—nine years before the thylacine disappeared.
Nor may it be the last. James Woodford, an environmental writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, has reported eloquently about the potential extinction of the northern hairy-nosed wombat, Australia’s most endangered mammal.
True, it is chilling deep to the bone to know the exact date a species disappeared from Earth. True, it is even more ghastly to look upon the place where it happened. But it is even more chilling, even more ghastly, to know that it may happen again, soon.
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