Thylacines Made Good Pets?? ;_; They Do Look Like They'd Feel Soft And Glossy To The Touch. I'm Obsessed

thylacines made good pets?? ;_; they do look like they'd feel soft and glossy to the touch. I'm obsessed with tassie devils, myself, but I'm resigned that they may go extinct before I can travel far enough to see them. I wish I could pet one.

They were obviously not domesticated to the level of having domestication syndrome features (not that I'm sure a marsupial animal *would*), but there are historical records of Tasmanians who kept them as pets, including both white settlers and indigenous people.

Thylacines were somewhat prone to capture myopathy (a stress reaction that causes some animals to die if trapped/captured) and sometimes died after capture, but many did not. If the animals were treated kindly they would generally respond well to attempts to tame them, and this was even more true of orphaned baby thylacines that were raised by humans. There are several stories of people who tamed thylacines very shortly after capture. One such thylacine was let go when she went into season and became restless, and she later introduced her pups to the man she had lived with.

Indigenous people were recorded as having kept them. One indigenous informant stated that they called them "stripey dogs" when they spoke English.

One of my favourite stories was of a white settler family had a large house and kept their thylacine on an extremely long chain in the front so that she could act as a sort of watchdog. This thylacine would watch over the children playing and did not react violently to them even if she was accidentally hit by a ball (she knew that this was an accident) and would give warning of anyone approaching.

The likely reason that thylacines did not become popular household companions was the hate campaign that sprung up around them, stating that they were sheep killers. Once that got to be a big issue and bounties were offered for killing them, people who were taming and raising the animals frequently found them killed, and they gave up on it.

Many of these stories are in Robert Paddle's book, which is an academic study but is extremely readable.