#wilfred batty

[tigertoons]

We should kill him with hammers

[thylacine-dreams]

Last known photograph of thylacine sold at auction

A FASCINATION with the Tasmanian tiger has lead a Hobart man to pay top dollar for a photograph of the last known thylacine in the wild.

The original photograph, purchased by Nevin Hurst sold at Gowan’s auctions for $9775 last Saturday.

According to an article in The Advocate dated Wednesday, May 14, 1930, the photograph depicts a man named Wilfred Batty, who shot and killed the animal after seeing it kill poultry on his farm at Mawbanna.

The article said the animal was ‘exceptionally large,’ measuring five feet and six inches in length.

This image is slightly different than the one we’re used to seeing of Wilf!

[thylacine-dreams]

“The $55,000 search to find a Tasmanian tiger” - The Australian Women’s Weekly, 24 September 1980

This article contains an interview with an elderly Wilfred “Wilf” Batty, the man who is now famous for killing the last wild thylacine in 1930. It reads as follows:

“Fifty years ago Wilf Batty's shotgun blast started a legend. His target was what people thought was the last Tasmanian tiger in the wild. After that the tiger, or Thylacine, disappeared into the realms of fantasy and folklore. But has it really disappeared? Reports of sightings of the yellowish, wolf-like animal with dark stripes across its back are increasing. Findings of footprints and fur proliferate. The Weekly tracked down Wilf Batty. Now 79, he lives in Tasmania's north coast town of Wynyard. Was he really the man who shot the last Tasmanian tiger? "Aye," he said in pure north English accent. "Aye, I shot tiger. He were killing poultry." The date: May 6, 1930. The place: Mawbanna, Wilf's property in north-west Tasmania. The time: noon. It was the first and last Tasmanian tiger Wilf ever saw. Wilf tried to hold the tiger by the tail, but it swung him off balance and jumped a two-metre fence. Then he raised his double-barrelled gun and shot. "Only one shot," he said. "One shot int' shoulder. He lived full 20 minutes after. People came from all about to look. Teeth he had as could go right through a man's wrist. "I sold tiger for 5 pounds to Tiger Harrison, of Wynyard, who sold him to Hobart Museum for stuffing, who sent him ont' tour of Australia, and I haven't heard since where tiger is." Wilf believes the Thylacine (the last captive tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1933) became extinct, not because of bounties and hunts but because of distemper it caught from imported dogs.“ Source

[thylacine-dreams]

"On 13 May 1930, in the Mawbanna district of north-eastern Tasmania, farmer Wilf Batty was eating his lunch when he heard a loud squawking coming from the direction of his chicken coop. Without hesitation, he put down his soup spoon, seized his gun from the wall, pushed a couple of cartridges into the breech, and went out. He imagined the disturbance was being caused by an unwelcome visitor his farmworkers had seen in the area over the past few months.

Once outside, as he had feared, he saw an animal near the coop. As he recalled later, it had had its head under the wire mesh that surrounded the chickens. It looked at him for a moment, and then started to lope away, not particularly quickly, around the back of a shed. Batty followed, though both his kelpies hung back, whimpering.

It was a big, dog-like creature, low-slung, with a large head and a long, stiff tail. Its short brownish fur was banded all across the back with much darker, broad transverse stripes, which gave it its common name. Batty took careful aim as it headed for the perimeter fence, and fired. The animal dropped. Batty walked over and checked that it was dead, and then crossed his yard to see what damage had been done to his poultry. The beast he had killed belonged to a type that had a long-established reputation among farmers as a pest, though there had been fewer and fewer of them around over the last twenty years, and this was the first time in Batty's experience that he had heard of one raiding a henhouse. What Batty did not know was that it would also be the last time, for his action had made him the last man to shoot a Tasmanian tiger in the wild. Just over six years later the entire species would be extinct, when the last known survivor died in Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo, of neglect, on 7 September 1936." [x]

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