All the hyinas [sic] I have seen in the wild seemed to be about half grown and about the size of [a] full grown fox terrier dog, fawn in colour, with dark stripes on their sides and back, with a very long tail continued on from their bodies, their tails were half up and down like a tired dog. K. M. CRAWFORD, ULVERSTONE The people were fanatically loyal to the Crown and Britain . . . Hedgerows were smiled upon as a reminder of a Merrie England few if any of them had really ever known, the destruction of the native flora and fauna and its replacement by exotics went on apace, a fact which added to the picture of colonists being merely transplanted Britons.1 To the extent that the above observation is accurate, a grasp of the collective psyche of the growing colony becomes necessary in trying to determine the logic behind dislike of the thylacine. It was a consequence of the general attitude that saw the countryside as alien, finding expression in fear stories (the thylacine as a child-snatching vampire); in heroic man-and-dog versus beast stories; and, most negatively of all, in classifying the thylacine as vermin, to be exterminated through the inducement of financial reward, that is, bounties.
