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Tasmanian tiger devotees feed Australia's guilty obsession with a deliberate extinction

<span>Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

They regularly post bags full of scat to biology professors for testing. They spend their life savings on expensive camera equipment trying to capture one creature and create active social groups which have broken into warring rival factions. One has spent half a century of his life on the quest. And they’re on the plane down to Tasmania even more than Jacqui Lambie.

What makes people so fixated on trying to prove the thylacine – also known as the Tasmanian tiger and last spotted in 1936 – isn’t extinct?

One thing’s certain: their disappointment this week, when wildlife expert Nick Mooney dashed hopes of the Thylacine Awareness Group by declaring new pictures allegedly depicting a family of three thylacines were in fact most likely of pademelons, will not deter them one iota.

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Related: Wildlife expert pours cold water on claims Tasmanian tiger family spotted

Australia has lost more species of mammal than any other continent. Its the dubious world leader in extinction, but the thylacine seems to beguile and besot more than any other – with some this week “choking up” and declaring they’ve been “waiting for this my whole life”.

John Pickrell, wildlife writer and author of new book Flames of Extinction, tells Guardian Australia the appeal may lie in the combination of the thylacine’s uniqueness and our guilt. “It was the only large marsupial carnivore that lived to the modern day – there’s nothing else like it alive in the world,” he says.

“It’s an unusual extinct animal because it was around recently enough to be captured in photography and film footage, which is really enigmatic, evocative and sad. And it went extinct on our watch through deliberate persecution, so there’s a sense of responsibility for its loss.”

Features making it unusual include the fact it could hop, looked uncannily like a dog – and that females had a rear-facing pouch for joeys.

These distinct aspects have combined to create an obsession. Scores of people are dedicating their lives to the mission of finding one alive.

For Tassie tiger hunter and school teacher Murray McAllister, 60, from Dandenong in Melbourne’s south-east, there are two facets: love of the uniquely Australian animal, and human connection. “This persecuted and poisoned animal is part of our unique culture and heritage,” he tells Guardian Australia.

He has spent 20 years and two major expeditions on the quest, and his ultimate goal, after claiming to have last seen one in 2010, is to “catch one and build a cage around it”.

An illustration of two Tasmanian tigers. The creatures were driven to extinction after a government bounty was put on its head.
An illustration of two Tasmanian tigers. The creatures were driven to extinction after a government bounty was put on its head. Photograph: Markku Murto/art/Alamy

The need some feel to atone germinates a perceived opportunity for redemption; humans initially, ignorantly and irrationally feared the tiger-like creature, believing it to be a danger to them and their sheep. They killed or trapped it and eventually a government bounty was put on its head, ushering in its extinction.

Today people want to trap it for different reasons. McAllister still has cameras set up in the bush. He’s built a website and hopes to obtain pictures to release in a book. On this week’s false alert he says: “I’d get disappointed if it’s not me – I’m crossing my fingers wanting it to be me. Each time you go back, you say: I hope this is the time. After over 80 years of unproven sightings, I’d love to be the one to prove all the knockers wrong.”

For Tasmanian tiger devotees, this is a treasure hunt that enlivens all their senses – with claims they’ve heard its unique call, smelt its pungent scent, touched its excrement or – the jackpot – seen it with their own eyes.

Related: Australia's dingo fence from space: satellite images reveal its effects on landscape

For McAllister there’s also a personal motivation. “It gives me a sense of purpose,” he says. “I meet fascinating people I’d never have otherwise met – like old Col Bailey who’s spent 50 years on this. They’ve become lifelong friends, put me up in accommodation, shared their own journey.”

The sense of community, though, is sometimes split by competitiveness. “There are those who’ve burnt bridges with their own egos and agendas,” McAllister says. Cameras and footage get stolen. Notes, ideas and anecdotes get plagiarised. “People use you as a stepping stone,” he says, claiming this most recent phoney sighting is a PR exercise to promote an upcoming Screen Australia documentary about the “cashed-up and commercial” Thylacine Awareness Group.

For that reason, he says, he sits on his own research “for at least 18 months” before publishing it.

Guardian Australia contacted the Thylacine Awareness Group, but they did not respond before deadline.

The last known thylacine prowling around its cage at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania in 1935.
The last known thylacine prowling around its cage at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania in 1935. Photograph: Nfsa Handout/EPA

The now-mythical creature has been elevated to legendary status, with a whole suite of merchandise promoting it.

Not all thylacine devotees are happy about the fever pitch these quests have now reached.

Wade Francis, who runs the Thylacine Open Debate and Discussion Facebook Page, says: “Too many people without a scientific approach are turning what was a real animal into a joke subject like Bigfoot.”

And the Twitterspehere has, indeed, had its fun at this most recent alleged sighting.

Related: Tasmanian tiger sightings: 'I represent 3,000 people who have been told they’re nuts'

Ecology professor Bill Laurance from James Cook University often has excited people contacting him with alleged sightings. “In hearing the compelling detail and level of sincerity of people who contact me, it shows there’s lots of people desperate for it to still be alive,” he says.

Part of it is the elusiveness and mystery of bringing an animal consigned to oblivion back from the dead. “There’s an excitement with discovering a Lazarus species, like the night parrot” he says.

But he thinks people convince themselves: “Descriptions they’ve read creep into their mind.”

He’d also dearly love for the famed Tasmanian tiger to be found alive, but the chances of that happening? “Vanishingly small I’m afraid,” he says.

• Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist. Twitter: @garynunn1