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…
We made the dodo extinct despite it being so gross they Dutch sailors nicknamed it the “walgvogel” or “revulsion bird”.
Were they as annoying as seagulls? Because I could see that being a fairly valid reasoning back in the day.
By most accounts, iirc, they were large and slow, but also curious me friendly birds that would waddle over to check what sailors were doing.
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.
The ones we just hunt to extinction are the lucky ones.
We put the ones we find cute when we “develop” their land into cages, and force them to breed despite being effectively extinct solely so 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.
As far as the rest of the natural world is concerned, we are the monster under the bed.
It’s particularly sad, since the last of them were hunted down, and killed off for their feathers. The final egg got trampled by people chasing down its parents.
In French, the “correct” word for “penguin” is “manchot” /mãʃo/ , and “pingouin” /pɛ̃ɡwɛ̃/ stayed the word for “great auk” for longer… But translating “penguin” as “pingouin” has grown more and more common. First as a mistake, but at that point it’s not clear anymore what is correct or not. Someone a bit pedantic might correct you if you say “pingouin” instead of “manchot”, but is a linguistic mistake still a mistake when it’s understood by the majority?
My wife and I watched this documentary when it first came out and laughed at him the whole way through. It came up when he was on The Graham Norton show.
PENGUINS! IM TALKING ABOUT PENGUINS!
YEAH, science!
:,(
So what you’re saying… is that penguins are…
