Comment on Penguins 🐧
coyootje@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I recently learned about the great auk, it’s so sad that they no longer exist. Humans really suck, so many species went extinct because of us. And in this case it wasn’t even necessary for survival, they just killed a ton of them for their feathers to make fancier pillows (and other stuff) but they weren’t eaten I believe…
The ones we kill are the lucky ones.
We put the ones we find cute when we “develop” their land in cages, and force them to breed despite being effectively extinct solely we can gawk at them for our amusement.
We pump the ones we find delicious with laboratory hormones to make them freakishly obese, and cramp them in factory farms until they’re obese enough to kill.
The Auks and Dodos were treated kindly by the standards of our species.
We made the dodo extinct despite it being so gross they Dutch sailors nicknamed it the “walgvogel” or “revulsion bird”.
In fairness, that was mostly accidental, unlike with the Great Auk. They were driven to extinction by inadvertently-introduced predators, as opposed to being actively hunted.
Were they as annoying as seagulls? Because I could see that being a fairly valid reasoning back in the day.
By most accounts they were large and slow, but also curious me friendly birds that would waddle over to check what sailors were doing.
T156@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s particularly sad, since the last of them were killed off by vandalism. Someone went to kill the last pair and smash their eggs for fun.