2. ABOUT JEREMY GRIFFITH

 

WTM FAQ 2.7  Like Jeremy Griffith, I’ve always been captivated by that remarkable animal the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine. Does Jeremy think they are really extinct because even as a child I believed in my heart they were still around, hiding deep in the bush?

 

Jeremy Griffith’s response:

Yes, I certainly relate to being captivated by the Thylacine—imagine me as a young man learning there was this absolutely utterly incredible animal in Australia that might still exist; it was then only 30 years since the last captive Thylacine had died. I remember walking down the main street of Armidale in northern New South Wales in 1967 and walking into the post office and ringing Sir Edward Hallstrom, who was the director of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and whose son went on an expedition to see if he would find the Thylacine without success, and telling him I was going to go and find it. He was kind enough but dismissive. Well fu*k him, I found this hound dog abandoned on the side of the road nearly dead from starvation, and I had read about these special hound dogs in America that were used to hunt mountain lions because of their amazing ability to follow scent trails (in particular, I had read the book Reddy The Hound Dog), so I picked up ‘Loafy’, as I came to call him, nursed him back to health, trained him to track animals like rabbits, then hitchhiked with him all the way to Tasmania—and I never quit until I had searched the whole island, including inventing the first trail cameras that are now regularly used to monitor for an animal’s existence. But I didn’t even stop when I sadly concluded that the Thylacine was extinct because I’ve gone on to solve the deeper issue of why we’ve been so insensitive to nature, which is our psychotic human condition, and having solved that we can now save all the people on Earth, along with all the animals.

You can read a description of that most thorough search ever conducted for the Thylacine, and see a photo of Loafy and me on a motorbike heading out to save the Tiger, at www.humancondition.com/tasmanian-tiger-search.