Environmental Management in Tasmania: Better Off Dead? - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 159

Other bounty schemes were instated. The name of the Buckland and Spring Bay
Tiger Exterminating Association (in eastern Tasmania) left no doubt as to its mission.
The Hamilton Council (central Tasmania) operated a bounty scheme. The Glamorgan
Stock Protection Association (eastern Tasmania) negotiated a bounty scheme in
association with the government (Guiler 1985 ).
Eric Guiler sought out 'old-timer' trappers and concluded that the claims of
stock predation were exaggerated. He reported that one trapper “was emphatic that
many thylacines ignored sheep and would pass through a flock without paying any
attention to them” (1985:18). Guiler was assured that “losses by sheep stealing
were much greater than those sustained from thylacine killings” (Guiler 1985 :19).
Of farmer claims of predation, Guiler ( 1985 :20) concluded, that: “There is no doubt
that sheep were killed by thylacines but these claims were grossly exaggerated and
losses from other causes were inclined to be attributed to the thylacine”. Freeman
( 2005 ) argues that a 1921 photograph of a thylacine bearing a chicken in its jaws,
the sole photograph purporting to be of a thylacine with prey, was fabricated using
a stuffed thylacine, and it thus served not to inform, but rather to demonize the
thylacine.
Nevertheless, “As a direct result of the sheep losses, real or imaginary … a petition
signed by twenty-six residents of the east coast was presented to state parliament
on 28 October 1884 requesting that a bounty be paid on thylacine carcasses … the
matter appeared before parliament again on 4 November 1886 when the claim of
50,000 sheep lost per annum was made. At the time the rural group was very
powerful and the Lyne motion to pay £1 bounty … was carried by twelve votes
to eleven” (Guiler 1985 :20-21).
Putting moral, ethical and ecological considerations aside, in achieving its
objective, the government's thylacine bounty scheme was an undoubted success
story of island environmental management. The outcome was that an endemic spe-
cies was totally and permanently exterminated, and at a modest cost of thereabouts
of £2,112 (2,040 adults at £1, plus 144 juveniles at 10/- each). Whether the 'final
straw that broke the camel's back' was, in the case of the thylacine, the size of the
residual breeding population, loss of habitat, wild dog predation, human predation,
or distemper (Guiler 1985 ; Paddle 2000 ), the government's thylacine bounty
scheme finally ran out of customers with the last two bounties being paid in 1909.
There are no known living thylacines in Tasmania, and there may have been none
since 1936, the year that it was declared a protected species.
Icon
In 1913 Mary Grant Roberts' husband presented her with a solid gold brooch of a
thylacine to mark their golden wedding anniversary (Guiler 1986 ). This love-trinket
was an early adoption of the image of the thylacine for an ornamental purpose.
In this case, it was perhaps a trophy celebrating Roberts' successes in exporting
live thylacines to zoos including the London Zoo and Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo.