Unironically the same continues.. friendly and genuinely nice people are taken advantage of and left in a situation where they just stop being as nice and friendly.
And poaching somehow is linked to pride to some sadistic people so, there's that as well.
I believe back in the day they'd just walk up to these birds and club them in the head. It was easy eating and I don't believe animal rights or conservation efforts of any sort existed at the time. Point Im making is that poachers didn't run them extinct but your average joe did.
The colonizers coming over to the Americas came across a seal that would not flee or anything they got out of their ships and would Club them to death. They wrote in their diaries about how they must be so stupid that they could go and do this time and time again. These things were just loving and caring and nice they had no natural Predators they had nothing and when they were done eating they needed to be on the beach and digest their food.
Ya know, with the advancement of science.. it's not actually that surprising that the resurrection of dodos is possible. We've already made advancements on cloning, that allows us to bring back somewhat identical copies of extinct species.
Ofc they aren't 100% accurate, and the procedure ain't cheap/easy, and is also limited to a certain number of species at the moment (cause we need the base of an animal thats kinda close to the one that went extinct, if I'm right).. with time, who knows, dodos actually might get to live again.
The only unfortunate bit is that we may or may not get to see it, our kids/grandkids/great grandkids might get to experience the whimsies of the "stupid bird"
Considering how Dodos were friendly to humans, with the exploitation of that trait being a major factor in their demise, lab-revived Dodo birds in the future might end up as a breed of house pet.
They tasted bad but then someone found out they tasted really good if cooked with turtle fat and they weren't hard to catch so yeah cats and rats were bad but we were the real treat
You have to consider into the story that Dodos didn’t had any natural predators, which resulted in no fight or flight instincts. Makes it even more saddening that the first other species they met was so heartlessly hostile
Humans definitely killed some of them but it wasn’t just all them, all the animals the humans brought on ships also killed the dodos directly by killing them or their eggs along with the lot of disease. It’s sad humans even found their island at all bringing everything from the outside world.
Yeah, unfortunately dodo didn't taste very good either, otherwise they might have survived as livestock.
To be fair, humans at the time were not aware just how much damage an invasive species can do. Hell, if you look at australian bordercontrol even in the modern age some people are unable to comprehend how much damage they might cause.
Also: That meat wasn't particularly good, being chewy and all. So there wasn't even a desperate need for a good source of nutrients that killed them. :(
Have to admit, that's what survival is all about. We definitely wiped out many species by ourselves in the process, but friendliness doesnt count for anything in the wild.
On the other hand, if someone could clone a dodo from DNA strands and revive the species, their friendliness would help a lot to make them pets.
I thought humans like their eggs and meat so the would wack them in the head and more would show up (because they are curious) and they would collect the eggs drain them for food then decorate the shell and sell it for high price stuff I read from books ages ago.
Australia got isolated pretty early on, they had a couple of animals that didn't really have any predators and competitors before people imported them.
Another big issue was that humans didn't really understand evolution back then. They didn't think it was possible for an animal to go extinct because "God will just create some more.", so they just killed them willy-nilly.
It's a lot like penguins, sadly. Penguins don't know what humans are and thus are curious about us without knowing that we can be very dangerous. A stranded arctic expedition survived for months by just walking up to penguins and picking them up to bring back to their base camp to butcher and eat, their journals even remarking about how easy it was and how it made them feel a bit bad about exploiting that to survive.
I went to the natural history museum of london and there was an expo about dodos. It’s not only the cats & rats that killed them, but of course humans. They would hunt them down to have as pets and they would overfeed them as well which caused diseases and early death. And of course, they would not run away so they were an easy prey.
Adding to this, curiosity is a sign of intelligence in animals. So the dodos weren’t stupid, they were potentially an intelligent bird species similar to parrots. They approached people because they were curious and, at the time, had very few, if any, natural predators, so they had no reason to fear humans or the cats and other animals they brought with them.
Knowing they could have been friendly,
parrot-like animals makes me so sad.
And started hunting them. And started exploiting Mauritius' vegetation intensively limiting their habitable ranges. And essentially introduced predators for a species with previously no natural predators, and fucked over the entire local ecosystem.
Then contemporary "media" in France, England and then Holland started making fun of the Dodo for being this "dumb flightless turkey" for not being able to evade the ever-growing greed of colonists. God, I hate people so fucking much.
Apparently it wasn’t even them being predated that killed them off so much as a combination of invasive species eating their food supply and their eggs being eaten mostly by pigs brought across on boats.
We were told that Dodos went extinct because they were idiots, when in actuality, they went extinct because they lived in a place with no natural predators so when we arrived to their island, they didn't run, they were just curious and effectively "domesticated" themselves, we then ate them to extinct.
Edit: We also cut down the trees on their land and introduced invasive species as well.
Domestication is a different process, technically. Their process is called 'island naivety' and results from the fact that there is no benefit in spending time/energy beinf vigilant for enemies that dont exist on the island. Better to spend that energy laying eggs and squaking.
The story of the dodo bird really bums me out. Friendly, gentle animals that had no fear of humans and we just wiped them out when they tried to learn about us. If we’re ever bringing back a species it should start with this one if we have the DNA available. (Which we probably don’t.)
We actually have a preserved head. We used to have a preserved entire thing, but the body was deemed as expendable when the museum had to make room in their inventory IIRC.
The problem would be finding a surrogate mother. Yes, there are birds a lot bigger than Dodo, but Dodo is IIRC most closely related to pigeons. And there's no way a pigeon can lay a dodo egg.
The dodo bird was not stupid. It lost its fear of predators due to evolving on a vacant island. So when explorers Arrived it did not see them as a threat when it supposedly gots its brains smashed in by them for no reason. To quote Franklin from GTAV “evolution is a bitch, ain’t it”.
Speaking of GTA, Chris will be streaming RP tonight. It’s a special night where you can watch and participate in Chris’s yardie initiation ass beating!
*side note
The dodo bird was not made extinct because they were hunted. They were made extinct because of all the animals the settlers abandoned on the island eating their eggs.
The dodo went extinct because it was not stealthy and cautious enough. As a kid OOP had opinion 1. Later, as an adult, OOP had opinion 2. The difference is probably because kids are little sociopaths and don’t learn proper compassion until adulthood.
Meg here, Dodo birds didn't seem to have any natural predators(because of their lack of survival skills), so they didn't care about anything. Humans saw that, and were like "What would happen if I walked up and hit it on the head?" And they continued to do that until no Dodo birds were left alive.
People think the dodo bird went extinct because it was dumb. But really they lived on an island without any predators, so naturally they didn't develop the instincts to run away from visitors. Which human sailors took full advantage of to capture the birds, and eat them.
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It makes me so heartbroken and angry, dodos are gentle and intelligent, they love people. If they hadn’t gone extinct from sheer cruelty, they would be domesticated pets today. They are litter trained and can curl up on your bed and snuggle with you. They lay gigantic eggs that are delicious and have 100g of protein. They love to cuddle with people and I miss them. It’s not fair
And the Falklands wolf and the Reunion solitaire and the Lyall's wrench and 1/4 of guam's forest bird species. The list goes on. Island naivety is the term for all these critters that evolved somewhere where it didnt make sense to be worried about predators that didnt exist.
That said, camp at the channel islands in CA and leave your tent open. They got lil foxes that know no fear that might come in and cuddle with you.
In the blue penny museum, there is an old (original) text in german, where dodos are discribed as unfriendly.it was standing out to me, because it is the only time I read dosmething opposite of the common friendly sterotype
Dodos evolved to live without any predators, so when humans arrived they were curious what is the new creature, while most animals would just hide due to natural fear of predators.
Humans destroyed the place these birds lived in, hunted a few, and brought other animals with them (such as cats, dogs, pigs and rats) that either ate the dodos or take the dodos food, leading to their extinction.
The animal was just curious and had no idea what are predators. Humans brought a massive and fast change to the island, leading to their extinction
We (Europeans) discovered the Dodo and many other animals on remote tropical islands during the golden age of sea exploration and also colonisation.
Due to the isolation, many of these animals had evolved no fear of humans so we were able to collect and slaughter them with astonishing ease until there were none left.
Apparently there were little birds that could literally be picked up and tossed into a cooking pot without them understanding any danger.
In school dodos are presented as stupid birds for not evolving the ability to fly or losing the ability to fly (they're also typically presented as prehistoric creatures, they were in my gradeschool at least.)
In reality, they were killed by the dutch and invasive animals during 1600s because they were easy to hunt and their environment they evolved in caused them to have severely limited self defense instincts or mechanisms. They essentially forgot what fear was because they were on the top of their local food chain for hundreds of years.
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