Extinct Birds – The Great Auk.

Have you heard of the Great Auk?

This bird’s extinction is a sad, sad tale. After hunting the flightless bird down for food and downs and feathers, and a failed protection attempt, the last colony was found at the Icelandic coast, measuring maybe 50 individuals. Now you would think, finding the very last remaining colony of a peaceful penguin, people would at least leave them alone. Better, knowing they’re about to go extinct, they’d do the best to protect the remaining individuals and their living environment and, as a last resort, grant them refuge in a zoo or develop a breeding program to put the population back to secure numbers.

Well, you’d be wrong. While a normal human would think “Holy moly, these are about to go extinct, we need to save them!” 19th century idiots were thinking “Holy moly, these are about to go extinct, let’s kill them and collect specimens for our museums!”

They killed them down to the last pair and, to make the deed even more special and celestial, stomped on the last remaining egg.
Respect for nature and other creatures? ZILCH.
Respect for profit? HUGE.

Supposedly the never-to-be-hatched future-penguin in the egg wasn’t the last one – one individual was found in the 1840s and suffered a dramatic, man-made, torturous death due to the unreasonable stupidity of people who believe in magical woo-hoo: They caught the bird and for unknown reasons, kept it for two days until a storm hit. Apparently the storm was so inconvenient to them, they blamed the innocent bird (claiming it was a witch) and killed it. To be exact, they beat it to death with sticks.

We humans can be so barbaric to the other creatures who have the same right to inhabit the planet as we have.