Naturalist: The recent Conclusion claims that the Tasmanian tiger is not extinct are false. Support The Tasmanian tiger's natural habitat was taken over by sheep farming decades ago, resulting in the animal's systematic elimination from the area. Since then Support naturalists working in the region have discovered no hard evidence of its survival, such as carcasses or tracks. In spite of alleged sightings of the animal, the Tasmanian tiger no longer exists.
The Tasmanian tiger is extinct, because they were eliminated from their natural habitat and there’s been no evidence of their survival in the area since.
The naturalist is attempting to make a conclusion about worldwide extinction based on evidence limited to a region. We need to know that there’s no reason to search for the Tasmanian tiger’s existence elsewhere, because if there is, then the evidence limited to a region is inadequate.
Side note: Even if this argument was only trying to conclude that the tiger no longer lives in the region, we would still need to assume that absence of evidence of living in an area is significant to figuring out if the animal lives in that area.
Which one of the following is an assumption on which the naturalist's argument depends?
Sheep farming drove the last Tasmanian tigers to starvation by chasing them from their natural habitat.
Helpful, but not necessary. The tigers don’t need to have died from starvation, and it doesn’t need to have directly resulted from sheep farming.
Some scavengers in Tasmania are capable of destroying tiger carcasses without a trace.
Irrelevant. The support addresses evidence of survival, which carcasses don’t file into whether we find remains or not.
If negated, all scavengers would leave some trace after destroying tiger carcasses. This doesn’t destroy the argument.
Every naturalist working in the Tasmanian tiger's natural habitat has looked systematically for evidence of the tiger's survival.
We don’t need every naturalist on the job. The negation of this is that not every naturalist has tried to find evidence of the tiger’s survival—So what? We can’t assume that means that the naturalists not searching would be the ones to find survival evidence.
The Tasmanian tiger did not move and adapt to a different region in response to the loss of habitat.
This must be true for the naturalist’s premises to support the conclusion. If it isn’t true, then the geographic limitation of the argument’s support makes it inadequate for the conclusion; the tiger could’ve just gone somewhere else, but no one has looked there yet.
Those who have reported sightings of the Tasmanian tiger are not experienced naturalists.
We were already told that there’s no hard evidence of their survival. There’s no need to further discredit claims to the contrary.
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