Badasses

[forsythferret]

Humans are odd.

I've never gone hunting, and not in favor of humans wiping out species. I mean, obviously. My entire career I'm working toward involves trying to rejigger science and technology to work in partnership, or at least not against, nature.

And yet, when I was involved in a discussion about the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions today

Comments

[forsythferret]

Like any other mass extinction, more than one factor probably played a role, yes. Mammoths are hardly the only example, either. And even they survived on islands and North America until about the same time humans arrived. Many of the large animals that went extinct were herbivores, not carnivores, too.

There were a lot less of us, but there's usually less of any kind of large animals, because they need lots of food to survive, and more range. And if you look at how the Native Americans used to hunt buffalo, including things like stampeding herds over cliffs with fires, it's fairly plausible that human hunting could wipe out massive amounts of large animals. Hell, we almost did it to the American Bison, remember Oregon Trail?

The Dodo, on the other hand, was slightly different. That wasn't so much a matter of human predation as animals humans brought with us. In this case, rats that ate the eggs, and dogs that ate dodos. There'd been no natural predators on the island before we brought them, and dodos nested on the grounds.

Many poachers don't care, because of the money they make. Others are trying to feed their families, either directly or via the money they get from poaching. When you're trying to feed your family, that worry comes first, things like "how many elephants are left?" comes second, usually. That's one of the ways the problems of poverty and environmental degradation tie together. There's many more, which I should do a post about one of these days.