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The noose seemed to be closing around the thylacine's neck. At the time of the thylacine expedition search, plenty of trappers and others who had killed tigers for the bounty were still alive. While Bob, Jeremy, James, and others like them were finding it impossible to get even a whiff of a tiger, the older hunters described the tiger as easy to catch.

“I interviewed a lovely old man in Buckland. He had a big tree stump [on his property] and there were iron spikes right around it. Each one of those spikes represented the skull of a tiger that was kept on it. At his back fence were two big holes dug in the ground. They put tabletops over the holes and the tabletops had a steel axis across the middle. A tiger coming down the fence line would tread on one side of the table and it would tip. The tiger would drop into the pit and the table would close over it. In the morning they would take the tigers out. He told me they got forty tigers from a fence line that was half a mile long. That tells you how prevalent tigers were and how rapidly they were destroyed.”

We were surprised that the senator had called the killer of forty thylacines a “lovely old man.” His anger was directed not at individuals, but at the misguided policies behind the state-sponsored persecution of the thylacine.

“Nobody wants to talk about the deliberate extirpation of the tiger,” he said. Had we known, he asked, how close the vote had been that created the government-sponsored thylacine bounty?

Local livestock organizations, such as the Van Diemen's Land Company, had been putting up their own bounties through much of the nineteenth century. But it wasn't until 1886 that the Tasmanian government put up an island-wide bounty—effectively turning the killing of tigers into a business.

Sheep farmers on the East Coast had lobbied Tasmania's legislature for three years in a row to pass a government bounty. A petition they submitted in 1885 read:

The Native Tigers and other destructive animals are making such serious inroads on our flocks that many of us fear we shall have to abandon the Crown Lands occupied by us and give up sheep farming altogether, unless some means can be devised for combating this evil.

In the debate over this issue, sheep owners made outrageous, overblown claims that thylacines were ravaging their flocks. The bill's key supporter was John Lyne, a British-born sheep owner from Swansea, who claimed as many as fifty thousand sheep were being killed a year in his district. (Critics have noted that there were not that many sheep in the entire east coast region.) Opponents of the bill suggested the sheep farmers do more to protect their own flocks. Far more frequently than thylacine attacks, sheep were lost to disease, poor care, bad weather, and rustlers. But in the final vote, the bill was narrowly passed, by twelve to eleven. The government of Tasmania would pay £1 for the skin of a dead adult tiger. Bounty hunters could keep the skins after they had been properly marked by government officials and then earn another few shillings from their sale to the fur trade.

“From then on, every area of Tasmania was under the hunt,” Bob said. “If you look at that bounty book, each entry is a hunted-down tiger, a dead set of pups.”

In 1888, the first year the bounty was in effect, 81 thylacines were presented for the £1 payment. In 1889, 118 tiger skins were turned in. For the next sixteen years, the numbers varied from a low of 90 in 1890 to a high of 153 in 1900. Then in 1906, the numbers began to drop: 58 in 1906, 42 in 1907, 17 in 1908, 2 in 1909, zero in 1910, zero in 1911, zero in 1912.

By this point the animal was rare and worth considerably more than £1 to zoos. In 1914, Professor T. Thomas Flynn, a prominent zoologist at the University of Tasmania and the father of screen idol Errol Flynn, wrote that the thylacine

is extremely rare, and on that account fetches a very high price in the market.… It is, however, rather to be regretted that such an interesting relic of a primitive