AHC: Domesticated Thylacine

Pretty much what it says on the tin. With a POD of your choice, come up with a way for the Thylacine, aka Tasmanian Tiger, aka Tasmanian Wolf, aka Tassie, to get domesticated instead of going exinct. The degree of domestication could be anything from total (eg, dogs, assorted livestock, etc), to 'work in progress' (eg, various 'exotic' pets). As animals go, they were apparently very easy to tame, were successfully hand reared on at least one occasion, were kept as (apparently superiour) watch 'dogs' on multiple occasions, and were sort of cute, so I figure that given the right circumstances it's probably do-able.

Here's a picture for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know what a thylacine looks like:

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This is a bit of a stretch, but perhaps a widely publicized dingo/wild dog attack on someone who is a cultural celebrity in Australia 19th century Australia? This could create a backlash against importing and breeding more dogs (perhaps getting tied up in their anti-rabbit mania).

This feeling need not last forever or even very long, but just long enough for them to import some thyacilines and breed them in captivity as an alternative to dogs. The result would probably never replace man's best friend, but if you get enough thyacilines in captivity, they could create a self-sustaining population that becomes a source of novelty pets. Have a few celebrities outside of Australia adopt them, and they could stick around (perhaps Josephine Baker with a thyaciline instead of a cheetah?)

I'm afraid I don't know very much about Australia, but off the top of my head it's the best I can do.
 
How about some sort of disease epidemic that hits the Australian dog population at the end of the 19th century? If their dogs are dying of disease people might turn to the thylacine as an alternative. I don't know enough about canine biology, or virology, to say how plausible this is though.
 
I'd go back to c.4000 years ago and have the dingo never introduced to Australia. When Europeans make there, the thylacine becomes an Australian celebrity on par with kangaroos, emus, platypi and koalas, gets put on zoos all over the world and eventually someone teaches one to do tricks in a circus, TV show, whatever. That's assuming the thylacine would not just be tame and accepting of human contact, but also easy to breed in captivity (but see the cheetah for a similar sized carnivore that is easy to tame, yet historically hard to breed).

If you let the thylacine go extinct in Australia and just hang out in Tasmania, suddenly it's just a rare animal in some island far away, that would be better pushed aside to make room for sheep farmers. You'd see that same attitude in Australia early on and have the thylacine driven out of the more densely colonized areas in the east, but it would likely survive in more western areas long enough for 20th century protection to ride in and rescue it.
 
Maybe it becomes fashionable among upper class Victorians as a hunting dog substitute?

Yeah this sounds pretty plausible

They appear to have been ambush predators (like most felines), rather than pursuit predators like dogs so even assuming they could be tamed and bred in captivity with a view towards domestication, they wouldn't be likely to be of any use as Victorian hunting animals.

This also makes the scenario where no dogs make it to Australia and the aboriginals domesticate thylacines much more unlikely since that sort of behaviour doesn't really work well with human hunting behaviour. The reason dogs and humans mesh so well is because we're both pursuit predators dependent on endurance- dog hunting methods didn't really need to change once they were domesticated. An ambush predator isn't at all useful to hunter-gatherers.
 
Yeah. Humans lived almost 60,000 years side by side with the thylacine in Australia and up to 4,000 additional years in Tasmania and never domesticated it, so it's a safe bet the thylacine wouldn't be domesticated by Australian aborigines even in the absence of the dingo. That's why I spoke exclusively of modern Westerners ramdomly picking it and deciding to try something basically for the hell of it.
 
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Thylacines were Marsupials and did not have the same brain capacity as placentals.

Except they were considered fairly clever animals, capable of forming pack communication and strategy for hunting on par with big cats and dogs. I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Marsupials and placentals are both subject to the same rule that predators have a larger brain capacity than their prey (excepting primates, but that's a whole different kettle of fish). Thylacines were not the exception, and the currently endangered Tasmanian devil isn't either.

Since both belonged to the same group of marsupials, we know that the thylacine wasn't thick as bricks. Like any other carnivore, it had the brain capacity to learn not to bite the hand that feeds it, especially if raised from birth (see; most big cats, all dogs, even bears), and likewise it could very well learn through positive reinforcement like most carnivores do today. (In zoos, it's common practice to train fully-grown big cats to sit on scales by reinforcing this behaviour with something the animal might not usually get, such as milk).

I don't think the thylacine could be domesticated, for the same reason that cheetahs never were. They can be trained, but there's not enough variety or a large enough gene pool to 'breed out' the wild factors as there was in Canis lupus, Felis sylvestris, or indeed even Equus ferus.
 
I've been thinking about it since my last post and like a couple of people who've replied I've come to the conclusion that the most likely scenario is some variation of some rich and possibly eccentric guy seeing a thylacine, thinking 'I want one' and having a breeding pair imported, then showing them off to his friends who also think 'I want one' and things going from there.

On a vaguely related note, I once read a fanfic set in an alternate reality and one of the random background details was that Britain had a thriving feral thylacine population, although the hows and whys weren't explained.
 
On a vaguely related note, I once read a fanfic set in an alternate reality and one of the random background details was that Britain had a thriving feral thylacine population, although the hows and whys weren't explained.

Thylacines couldn't thrive in Britain. There'd be too much competition from already present foxes, which would outcompete an introduced marsupial population before it could take off.

I do believe we could see a captive population of thylacines growing and thriving in 19th Century Europe, leading to serious conservation efforts in the modern world to maintain the insurance policy against outright extinction. We might even see reintroductions into the wild if the dingo is seen as a pest rather than a national icon. But we won't see domestication. It's not enough that the animal is unusual and gimmicky - if it was, people would have tried domesticating kangaroos or wallabies in the same vein that they did aurochs and wild horses. Circus animals, maybe, or as a part of private menageries or collections, sure.
 
Perhaps it'd be possible to have the New Guinean population last into more contemporary times, and go from there? It certainly would at least give a larger population base to go with, and finding a way to butterfly their extinction in New Guinea might also save them on the Australian mainland - thus leaving a much larger population of indigenous predators to work with. Assuming they don't get treated as threats/pests, that is.
 
You're going about this ass backwards.

There's no displacing Dogs. Dogs have 40,000 years of association with humans, literally hundreds of specialized breeds, and well established economic roles. Lots of comfort zones there.

You need the Thylacine to do or offer some thing that they have a competitive advantage with. That's a tough one.
 
You're going about this ass backwards.

There's no displacing Dogs. Dogs have 40,000 years of association with humans, literally hundreds of specialized breeds, and well established economic roles. Lots of comfort zones there.

You need the Thylacine to do or offer some thing that they have a competitive advantage with. That's a tough one.

For what it's worth they apparently had better hearing according to the accounts of people who kept (remarkably tame and laid back) wild caught ones. Not sure if that counts for much though.

The simplest option is probably still some varient of 'slightly eccentric rich guy decides that they'd look good sitting by his feet and trotting along at his side when walking around his estate and ends up starting a trend'. The UK ended up with plenty of invasive species because someone liked the look of them and imported them; ending up with a captive breeding population of stripey exotic pets for the same reason doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.

Incidently, I found some information regarding the ones kept as pets in OTL which may be relevent to the discussion:

Perhaps the pinacle example of the thylacine's suitability to being a pet is contained in the following short example. "William Breton, from his first contact with a captive thylacine, in which he noted that it 'can be tamed with ... facility' was enamoured of the species. He ... defended its captive personality from assumptions about the species in the wild: 'It is said to be stupid and indolent; but this is a mistake'. Finally, fourteen years after meeting his first pet thylacine, he was able to obtain one himself and proudly brought it along to the Royal Society meeting of 4 August 1847." (p 70) As mentioned, this passage of Paddle's book details many of the 22 thylacines known to have been kept in captivity in the 1800s. One such reference is with regard to Mr Gunn who kept three thylacines to 1851, and more thereafter, who noted "'my living Thylacine is becoming tamer: it seems far from being a vicious animal at its worst, and the name Tiger or Hyaena gives a most unjust idea of its fierceness'" (p 71). Other quotations on this page include "extremely tame", "quite affectionate" and "behaved just like a dog and ... got very friendly".
As noted earlier, Paddle remarked that "it is not easy to locate nineteenth-century records of individually held captive thylacines" (p 70), but he goes on to say "far more specific details are known of the treatment and behaviour of privately held pet thylacines in the twentieth century. Captive thylacines were treated just like dogs: they wore collars and were walked on a lead." (p 72).


Apart from bringing a thylacine to the Royal Society meeting, this next account is one I find most astounding - again because we are dealing with a captive caught animal, but note just how ridiculously quickly this wild creature adapted to its newfound captive status: Quoting Graham, "Mr William Cotton [snr] came into the town of Swansea leading a Tasmanian Tiger, most people at the time were scared of the animal, and were amazed to see a person doing such a thing. ... Cotton ... had snares set about 4 miles [6.4 km] west of Swansea ... and ... one morning found he had caught a tiger. ... After some consideration he cut a short pole about five feet long, and to the end attached a piece of rope ... and with a noose made on the end slipped it over the tigers neck, held him at bay, cut the snare, and set of [sic] to Swansea leading the tiger with him. He had great trouble to get the animal to travel, but after going a few hundred yards the animal started to act just like as if it was a dog, and followed along beside him for the rest of the way to Swansea with the lease of trouble" (p 72).



A few hundred yards! One animal is recorded as walking with its owner for 10 kilometers on a lead in the 1920s. "Newly caught captives soon gave up aggresive responses towards their primary care-giver, accepting the parameters of the power relationship newly entered into: 'my grandfather caught ... them and took them ... down to Hobart into the zoo. ... He took one home and he ... had him tied up on a dog-chain and he used to feed him rabbits, in an old blacksmith's shop. And he walked in one night and thought he was back from him - struck a match before he was going to give him the rabbit, like - and he was standing up against the old tiger. He'd walked further over towards him than he'd thought, and the old tiger's standing there, wagging his tail, he said, looking up at him, waiting for him to give him the rabbit.'" (quoting Miles) (pp 72 - 73).



A child, Irene Simmons, would play ball games near this thylacine and if the ball "landed on or near the thylacine, Irene would just walk up to the animal, pick up the ball and continue playing. The thylacine made no aggressive response or vocalisation towards her at all. Irene treated it as if it were a well-trained domestic dog kept about the house - and indeed, that was how the animal behaved" (p 74).


Again - note that the ball could even land on the thylacine and it wouldn't act aggressively towards a child.


(http://www.wherelightmeetsdark.com/index.php?module=wiki&page=ThylacineAsAPet)
 
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