Tasmanian Devil Read Online Free PDF

Tasmania’s rural population is small and interconnected and locals involved in such a trade would have to go about their cruel business with great caution.
    An incident in Perth, Western Australia, in July 1997 appears to confirm that there is such a trade. As reported by CNN, a woman found:
    an unusual illegal immigrant hiding under her car: a Tasmanian Devil . . . The Department of Conservation and Land Management did a little checking around. There are 16 registered licensees in Western Australia who are permitted to keep Tasmanian Devils, and none of them was missing any. The department believes the animal was imported illegally and kept as a pet before escaping. 28
    US Navy aircraft carriers occasionally visit Hobart, and in one year in the 1990s strong rumours were about that a number of sailors with Tasmanian devil tattoos—the animal was their group mascot—swapped or attempted to swap handguns for live devils.
    Devil experts are occasionally asked if the animals can interbreed with dogs, the unspoken reason being a desire to breed a presumably omnipotent fighting hound.
    Cruelty and ignorance have hurt the devil in many ways. One or two individual farmers are believed to have had an annual kill rate of over 1000 a year, through strychnine poisoning, trained dogs and mass trapping. George Davis witnessed a particularly cruel method of killing them. A northern farmer placed a 220-litre water tank in the ground and ran a baited drop-plank over it, luring devils onto the plank which then tipped them into the tank, where they fought and ate one another.
    An east coast farmer used to kill them by nailing a baited shark hook to a tree trunk, at a height that would hook the devil on tiptoes so that it couldn’t escape and would die in agony. A head keeper at Bonorong Wildlife Park witnessed fifteen shot devils being thrown on a bonfire. A senior Parks and Wildlife officer was heard to say that while he would avoid a wombat on the road, devils were fair game.
    In 1993 Mooney found 32 dead devils around poisoned sheep carcasses, near a popular trout fishing spot in the central highlands. All had had their saddles skinned off. It appeared to be a mass killing for perhaps a floor mat, and such a mat may well adorn a central highlands fishing shack.
    In 1952 David Fleay wrote:
    Fur trappers who still carry on large scale operations during the winters of western Tasmania heartily dislike the snare-despoiling Devil, and often go to extreme lengths to rid a particular area of these animals before the season begins. An old pine shack below the frowning Frenchman Range is still known as the Devil’s Camp—thanks to the pitiless work carried out by the first snarers there who poisoned and trapped the unfortunate carnivores so that their whitened bones lay in that vicinity for many years afterwards. 29
    The apparent capacity of the devil to survive in both ‘plague’ and dangerously low numbers, despite human interference, seems to be another of its remarkable features, but to believe so is to perpetuate the myth that the natural world, like an ageless superheavyweight boxer, can continue to absorb everything thrown at it. And it may be that a combination of human-induced factors is fully or partly responsible for the outbreak of the devastating DFTD, from which the devil may not recover. Little is yet known about the disease beyond the fact that it spreads through populations and kills individual animals within about six months. Half of Tasmania was affected by the beginning of 2005. There is no historical account of a devil with gross external tumours, which indicates that DFTD could be a ‘new’ disease and thus may be associated with human activity. An early twentieth-century decline—if it did happen—is more likely to have been linked to thylacine trapping and the snaring of possums and wallabies than to disease.
    Can devil numbers sustain ‘everything’? The question hinges