“Why on earth did people want to kill off such a fantastic creature?”
In the name of protecting their livestock, iirc, the same reason humans have waged war on predators for since time immemorial…

On a positive note, it’s worth mentioning several marsupials *have* turned up after being missing for longer than the thylacine has been, iirc…

She was a little bit too negative at the end, I think.

GARY THE CAT:

I guarantee if they were to be found alive all efforts would be made (especially legislative-wise) to protect the creature.

At least, I hope it would happen. One never knows.

I hope that they survive. It’s terrible that the last one in captivity died from neglect and exposure, and that no one thought to secure a captive population to continue the species.

As much as I wish that large carnivores could always be free, the sad fact is that their time in the wild seems to be running out. As I type this I was just reading that there are thought to be fewer than 2,000 tigers left in India - and India has the largest wild tiger population of any country. At least the tigers and other carnivores in responsible captive breeding programs will ensure that their species do not go completely extinct.

Maybe, when and if living thylacines are found, this time around, people will value them and take measures to save them.

But as my math tutor would say hope is not a strategy. and that is why i got a c-.

Like the eastern cougar, the thylacine is documented and its behaviors pretty well recorded by humans who interacted with them, and whose accounts, obviously, were taken seriously. One would think - as I tend to think about the cougar, part of whose problem was that it’s so easy to tree when beset by dogs - that if the observed behaviors contributed to its apparent extinction, it doesn’t exactly seem to be the rule that holdouts adopting distinctly different behaviors to avoid human detection are what we should expect.

In the interest of equal time, I suppose that European brown bears (and maybe we can add the American grizzly to this) HAVE adopted a different mindset toward humans. The Lewis and Clark journals speak of numerous “unprovoked” attacks, something that doesn’t seem to happen with brown bears now. At least not as frequently as one might expect. Maybe, as someone once put it, the biggest baddest and boldest get selected out of the gene pool, and the ones that remain are the shy and furtive. Our species radar is set for the former, and we flat miss the latter. Villagers living at the edge of brown bear habitat in the Italian Abruzzi, for example, were shocked to find out about their neighbors from biologists, despite their reliance on bear-tempting industries like agriculture and livestock.

I find it much easier, though, to accept the possibility of cryptids like the yeti or sasquatch (do tell!) than of the thylacine. (Eastern cougar? Well, we still have plenty of western ones, and cougars need huge territories.) The hairy hominoids have NEVER been accepted by Europeans, with the result that we haven’t pursued them the way we have the ones we accept.