The day a Scotch terrier killed a thylacine

 

"Scotch terrier" from Stonehenge's Dog in Health and Disease (1859).

The following account appeared in the Hobart Town Gazette (2 August 1823). It is quoted in Robert Paddle’s The Last Tasmanian Tiger.

Paddle explains that the thylacine probably could have defended itself against an attack by a small terrier, but it was so stressed by the four large dogs and the large number of men standing nearby that it didn’t focus its attention on the small terrier– which was a fatal mistake.

One should not assume that the dog called a “Scotch terrier” in 1823 or 1859 was exactly the same thing as the dog we call the Scottish terrier today. “Scotch terrier” was a term that referred to terriers from Scotland, which were varied in type from region to region and from strain to strain.

Australian native fauna was know for its naivete  when they first encountered European domestic and introduced animals. There was nothing on Tasmania that would have given the thylacine any clue that an animal of that size could have been a threat. I don’t think Tasmanian devils ever kill thylacines, but they may have been able to bluff them off their kills. I seriously doubt that any thylacine would have had reason to worry about them.

So why should it have worried about a small terrier? Especially when a pack of kangaroo dogs is nearby. Kangaroo dogs are a landrace of sighthounds that are roughly analogous to the staghounds of the American West. They probably could have killed a thylacine, but they were too scare of it.

I actually do wonder what dogs actually thought abut the thylacine. I know that dogs will respond to objects that are in roughly the same shape as another dog, and a thylacine superficially looked like dog. However, its behavior would have been remarkably different, and dogs might have been disconcerted when encountering it.  The thylacine had very powerful jaws that were structurally quite weak, which explains why there is a more famous account of a thylacine splitting open the skull of a bull terrier as the bull terrier charged in for the kill. It probably wouldn’t have bitten that hard had its life not been so threatened.

And one killed by the Scotch terrier didn’t have time to react to the attack– until it was too late.

 

 

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