Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [53]
She didn't look like a giant—but then again, this youthful crayfish was already the size of an average adult crayfish in America. In Louisiana and Mississippi—America's crayfish capitals—crayfish typically reach sizes of about three inches, and they're considered a delicacy, served up as crayfish étouffée, crayfish bisque, and crawdads in clarified butter. On mainland Australia, crayfish are called yabbies—and eaten with similar zeal—barbecued with garlic or put into salads with mango and avocado. When we thought about all this, we began to get a little hungry. It was getting toward lunchtime.
Todd must have sensed what we were thinking. Conservationists, he told us, have been advocating that the lobster be rechristened as tayatea, what's believed to be their original aboriginal name, in the hopes that if it isn't called a lobster anymore, people won't be tempted to eat its sweet, delectable flesh.
Todd put the crayfish down on the stream bank and she backed away from us. Crayfish everywhere walk backward, keeping their eyes—and claws—facing the enemy. As she back-stepped into the water, she looked like a gunslinger exiting a bar with both barrels raised. Then she took on the color of the stones—and melted away.
Todd said it was time to check the traps. We churn-clomped back up-river—and checked each one: Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty. The bait hadn't been touched. So we headed downriver again and set up on a dry, gravelly bank to eat lunch.
We had brought chicken, or chook, sandwiches, garnished with butter, lettuce, and beets. Tasmanians seemed to prefer butter over mayo in their sandwiches, and sweet purple beets over tomatoes. As we ate we observed hundreds of butterflies and other flying insects swarming in the treetops above the riverbank. We listened for birdcalls, but didn't hear any— maybe it was too hot. We all sat silently for a minute.
“So have you ever seen a thylacine?” Alexis blurted.
Todd laughed. “Ahhh, no I haven't.”
“What do you make of all the sightings?”
“Well…I think if they survived, someone would have a photo or a video or a dead one somewhere.” He followed up with the rational, scientific viewpoint: “When they were shooting them for the bounty, they shot a hundred in one year, a hundred the next year, a hundred the third year, and then none or one the next year. Their stocks were down, and they reckon now that it's just bad luck that they decided to get a plague, like a flu, go through them. They couldn't handle it. The population just crashed.”
He was probably right. We'd heard this argument before that the tigers had been pushed into extinction by the one-two punch of overhunting followed by disease. But we still felt a vague, tiny, ultra-minute glimmer of hope.
“What do you think of all the people who come to look for the tiger?”
Todd paused a moment before answering. “Ah, well, they're in a dreamworld,” he said. “It's like the Yeti or Bigfoot, isn't it?”
Tasmanians, he said, needed to get more involved in protecting the native animals that were still around. And sometimes that meant using tough measures. He cited the feral cat problem as an example. “They kill birds, they kill small mammals … and they're bloody big, big as a possum. Savage. They get to six kilo. That's fourteen pounds.”
“What's the best way to get rid of them?” Alexis asked.
“I had a steel trap, but I've given it back to the Parks Department now. It had a trip lever inside and when the door shut, they couldn't get out. Then I'd take the whole thing, put that in a big plastic bag, and then put it on the exhaust pipe. It might frighten them a bit, but they certainly don't have any pain. They just get knocked out and die. I reckon thirty seconds and they're unconscious, so I think it's a great way to kill them. I only do that because it's a painless way to go. The RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] wouldn't see it that way. You're