Dr Harington may be an expert on animal cncers, but he knows stuff-all about Tasmanian anthropology.

Exporting a quartet of an already inbred species such as the devil, which are fourth-generation captive bred in a wildlife park within the epidemic zone of a virulent cancer whose transmission process remains unclear, must have seemed inexplicably dumb to Dr Harington. But he probably presumed that this decision was made on the best available advice.

He wouldn’t have realised that this was an executive decision, made on behalf of the executive, without the slightest concern that it might be dumb in respect to anyone else.

DFTD isn’t the only kind of rot flourishing in the state of Tasmania.

John Hayward
Weegena

Even here in Alice Springs I’ve heard rumours as to how the public service was running around the state of Tasmania to cover for the ministers once the announcement was made to export devils to marry the administrative needs with the publicity needs.

I won’t name names.

This international export of devils (to Denmark) has totally leapfrogged the initial intention of program to get insurance populations of disease-free devils into top-class zoos in mainland Australia (e.g. Taronga, Melbourne Zoo and Healesville Sanctuary) for captive breeding purposes.

I believe, the Denmark quartet are from two breedings of captive-bred devils from Trowunna Wildlife Park at Mole Creek. They go to a world famous zoo with very good quarantine standards.

The precautionary principle is at work here. These export devils ‘should’ be disease-free but there is still some uncertainty. The only devils that I am aware of that have developed DFT in captivity were ones trapped from infected populations and held by the Department; no devils from wildlife parks are known to have developed this fatal cancer. But there are reports of free-ranging devils with DFT from around Mole Creek and Trowunna Park.

We still don’t know what is the incubation period for this disease - i.e. the time from first exposure to first visible signs of cancer.

Because we don’t know what causes this disease, there is no test to determine if a devil is incubating “the disease” - i.e. a screening test for devils to see if they carry a particular marker protein, a specific antibody or genomic fingerprint related to this cancer.

We wish them well and may ‘the force’ be with them to remain free of this fatal infectious cancer.