British animal lovers rush to Irian Jaya
By Spencer Vignes
LONDON (JP): Indonesia can expect to benefit from an unusually high number of British tourists flocking to its shores over the coming months.
But for once they won't all be coming in search of a suntan on Bali's beaches or a visit to one of the country's legendary temples. Their holy grail doesn't even have an Indonesian origin.
The reason for the expected mass exodus from the United Kingdom lies in the obsessive British love of animals, particularly endangered ones found thousands of miles away from the busy streets of London, Birmingham and Glasgow.
Passions have been stirred by recent reports in British daily newspapers from Irian Jaya concerning alleged sightings of an animal called a Thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, presumed extinct for over 60 years.
According to reports from farmers in remote areas of Irian Jaya, animals resembling the Thylacine have been attacking and killing livestock, in some cases decimating herds and putting rural livelihoods at risk.
The reports alone have been enough to send the pulses of many animal lovers racing, even though it has yet to be confirmed whether the animal responsible is indeed a Thylacine.
The animal -- a carnivorous marsupial with the head of a wolf, a streamlined body and the tail of a rat -- had been presumed extinct since 1936, when farmers in the Australian state of Tasmania claimed to have killed them off following attacks on lambs and sheep.
Now British animal lovers are dusting off their world atlases, not only in an attempt to discover where Irian Jaya is but also to find out the best way of getting there.
"If the reports do turn out to be true then it's an amazing discovery," says Huw Morgan, a retired teacher from Cardiff, Wales, who has spent most of his summer holidays over the past 30 years traveling abroad in the pursuit of rare and endangered animals.
"Until now they were presumed to have been unique to Tasmania, so the fact they may have turned up in Indonesia does seem surprising.
"I've never been to Irian Jaya. I must admit that until about a month ago I'd never been heard of it.
"But these reported sightings present too good an opportunity to miss. They sound authentic, so I'm planning to travel out there in June and have a look around for myself."
Huw will be accompanied by his friend Paul Shore, 44, from Bristol, England, a freelance photographer and veteran of 12 trips to Africa on the trail of rare animals.
"I'm a member of several wildlife clubs and societies, and after the newspapers carried reports of the tiger I must have spoken to at least a dozen people who all thought they should go out to Indonesia to see if the stories are true," he says.
"I know the reason they were killed in such great numbers was because the Tasmanians treated them as vermin, and yes they do apparently resemble huge rats. They may not have the grace or beauty of a lion or tiger."
Shore acknowledged that the sightings may be of another animal. "But the reports do seem to have captured the imagination of animal lovers such as myself. They'll be no shortage of people wanting to go and see if they still exist, particularly from the British Isles.
"Anyway, I hear there's beautiful countryside over there and that's got to be worth seeing."
Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) representative in Jakarta, Rom Liley, said Tasmanian tigers were common in Irian Jaya and Australia between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago.
A Tasmanian tiger was caught near the Jayawijaya glacier in 1933 and transferred to Bonaris National Park in Tasmania, where it died three years later.
Liley said he believed Tasmanian tigers, also called Tasmanian wolves, still existed in Jayawijaya because Baliem Valley residents had recently reported wolf attacks on their cattle.