Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [43]
Shacky trotted down to survey the carcass, her glossy coat shining in the light as she approached it. There was a hint of stealth in her movements. Before venturing to take a bite, she lifted her head and appeared to look right at us through the window. “She can't see you,” Geoff whispered. Her pink ears twitched ever so slightly, as if she were listening for an approaching threat. Then below the wallaby's tail, she tore off a gob of flesh and chewed it in the back of her jaw. We could see her fangs flashing as she cut through each bite with her molars.
“This is a typical way that they'll enter a carcass,” said Geoff. “In through the anus. They find a soft bit that they'll work and work until they get it open enough, and then they're right into the rich meat of the rear legs.”
We heard the sound of teeth chewing on flesh amplified behind us— and jumped. What was that? Geoff had hidden a baby monitor in the grass near the wallaby carcass and placed the speaker over the fireplace. Rip. Smack. “I like to leave that as a little surprise,” he said. Through the window, we observed Shacky using her muscular neck and jaws to yank off tidbits of fat, flesh, and gristle.
“In the morning there won't be anything left of the carcass … except the bottom jaw with little teeth in it and maybe some crushed bits of bone.”
We asked Geoff what the devils would be eating if we hadn't left the wallaby out for them.
Devils, he explained, are incredibly adept at finding food. They'll troll up and down the beach, sniffing for the washed-up carcasses of seals, birds, and fish. Inland, they'll smell out dead wallabies, pademelons, platypuses, wombats, frogs, even dead farm animals. They also dine on Tasmania's endless supply of roadkill.
“Do they ever eat human remains?” we asked.
Geoff assured us that if we ended up dying in the remote bush, where so many things can go wrong—hitting your head, breaking your ankle— Shacky or one of her pals would take care of us. “There's no worries at all,” he said cheerfully. “A lot of the bushwalkers who go missing in Tasmania are cleaned up by devils.”
But did he know of any actual cases where devils had eaten a person's body?
Geoff thought back. “There was a guy who hung himself up in New Norfolk and his legs were missing,” he said. “And then there was another case where all that was left of a body was bones—strewn over a large area.”
Perhaps because of their carrion-eating ways and the fact that they occasionally snacked on dead humans, devils were never very popular in Tasmania. The pejorative name “devil” was assigned to them by the earliest English settlers. It's only recently that the devils' evolutionary value and role in the ecosystem have been appreciated. Today, the devil is the official symbol of the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. But many of the farmers who live near Geoff still think devils are foul beasts. “One of the things I'm trying to do is show that devils aren't as evil as they're made out to be,” Geoff said. “They're pretty rough with each other, though they don't often hurt each other in their contests. And with people, they're actually quite timid.”
They also might have some medical benefits. Geoff pointed at the small open wound on Shacky's right flank. “She's had that now for two years. It doesn't seem to heal. But it hasn't seemed to harm her either. Devils have an incredible antibacterial quality to their blood, similar to crocodiles. They've done a little testing. So you might be sitting in New York in a few years' time and rubbing ‘devil blood cream’ on your hands.”
For all the gore, Shacky was rather elegant. She was particular about the way she tackled her meal and occasionally