
Animals We Ate into Extinction - shawndumas
https://www.britannica.com/list/6-animals-we-ate-into-extinction
======
beloch
Humans likely hunted several species to death after reaching North America,
including:

\- North American horses (several species)

\- North American camels

\- Giant Bison

\- Tapirs (several North American species)

\- Llama's (several North American species)

\- Stag Moose

\- Gomphotheres (several species, similar to elephants)

Several other species of North American megafauna, such as North American
lions and giant beavers likely went extinct due to human activities even
though there's no evidence they were hunted directly. e.g. The extinction of
most of their prey likely did the lions in.

It's actually quite shocking what humans with rocks, sticks, and empty bellies
were able to do. There can be little doubt that the domestication of animals
for food has spared countless other species from a similar fate over the last
ten thousand years.

~~~
RachelF
Humans did the same thing, causing a mass extinction of around half the large
mammals in Australia and many other species when they reached the continent
around 40,000 years ago. Not only did we hunt large animals, but we burned the
forests regularly, driving more to the brink.

The same thing happened around 1000 years ago when we reached New Zealand and
Madagascar.

Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.

~~~
chicago_wade
> Most of the damage of the Anthropocene may already have been done.

Unless global warming gets sufficiently bad, in which case that will be the
worst damage.

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qume
No moa [1] Britannica, really? It's not even on the 'birds that don't fly' on
the next page!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa)

~~~
mrmondo
Came here to say just this, and the Haast Eagle as well...

~~~
WillReplyfFood
They died for the glory of the british empire. Civilization and animals
everyhwere beware!

~~~
fenwick67
Actually it was the Māori not the British.

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qume
A nice alternative version of this would be 'Animals We Ate into
Proliferation'

~~~
justinator
We can play the home version:

chickens cows pigs

I think that's it! Sheep are mostly used for wool, goats for milk and the odd
lambchop.

I guess there's some geese and ducks.

I would salmon, but does farming of them displace more of the habitat loss
we've cost them with damns, mining, oil fields, etc?

~~~
phillc73
I think it depends where you are, regarding the use of sheep.

In Australia and New Zealand, lamb consumption is quite popular. Australian
figures from 2016 show 9.5kg of lamb consumed per capita[1]. From the article:

"This means that with underlying population growth, the total volume consumed
in Australia is forecast to edge above 240,000 tonnes cwt by 2020, which will
account for 46% of Australia’s lamb production."

Which means there's a further 250,000 tonnes exported.

The UK appears to be even higher in absolute numbers. Average purchase per
week per person of mutton and lamb was 35 grams, which equates to 1.82kg per
annum[2]. With a population of 63 million, that is once again a fairly large
consumption of sheep.

[1] [https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-
news/2016-austr...](https://www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/market-
news/2016-australian-lamb-consumption-figures-demonstrate-resilience/)

[2] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-
househo...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/284346/weekly-uk-household-
consumption-of-mutton-and-lamb-in-the-united-kingdom/)

------
dom0
> Humans are not always great at self-moderation

Humans are _never_ great at self-moderation.

~~~
dTal
I was going to post a snarky reply to this, but thought better of it.

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flarg
Can I commend the writing on this Web site? I know traditional encyclopedias
have been over shadowed by Wikipedia, but the standard of writing and
information density does not compare to what went before.

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singularity2001
10? How about hundreds? (in Australia and Americas alone)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals)

~~~
hamstergene
How about billions?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction)

The evolution itself is made of extinctions. All current species exist because
their ancestors have pushed some of their contemporaries to go extinct. These
lists are just those we know about.

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partycoder
We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, the extinction event
with the highest extinction rate. Killing the animals is part of what we have
done to destroy species, there's also habitat destruction.

And if we are smart enough and we melt the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we are
next in line after we release enough methane to recreate Permian-Triassic
extinction event.

"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over
the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing
that moves on the earth." ... then go extinct.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"the extinction event with the highest extinction rate."

Sorry, that is not correct. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out around 75% of
_all living species_ , apparently within the span of a couple of years.

~~~
partycoder
The P-Tr extinction event is acknowledged as being the most severe of all. One
of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds... which is
a self-reinforcing phenomenon: as temperature raises, methane release
accelerates, reinforcing the temperature raise which reinforces the methane
release and so on... That could realistically happen again within our
lifetime.

~~~
Santosh83
So does anyone know exactly what brought the planet back to normal after the
release of all this methane? Why didn't the Earth careen into an unstoppable
spiral of planet-wide heating like Venus did?

~~~
yoodenvranx
That is what I was wondering as well. The climate on eart seems to be very
britty and very robust at the same time. What stops it from going completely
crazy?

~~~
pavlov
Maybe it's a variation of the anthropic principle? Earth is not a Venus simply
because we're here to observe it.

We don't (yet) have data about climates on Earth-like planets in other solar
systems. It could be that Earth is an extreme outlier in having a stable
climate system.

~~~
jacobush
Yes and no - I think it is life that is the stabilising factor. Venus probably
never had any. Also it's much closer to the sun.

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memburcar
Who knows - we could see the resurrection of the woolly mammoth -
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-
mammo...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammoth-
resurrection-scientists)

------
RickJWagner
Eat more mosquitoes.

~~~
EADGBE
Ironically, they're saying the exact same thing of us. On their HN, none-the-
less.

