Cicero, if you are an expert on the subject, please enlighten me. Perhaps I have been misinformed. What did the British colonial authorities do to protect the Tasmanian culture, way of life, and indigenous population?
Anyway, I apologize to the OP for hijacking this thread. The topic I introduced would be better served in a different thread in Great Debates, if anyone is interested to start one.
Even the extinction of the passenger pigeon pales in comparison to Steller’s sea cow, which was hunted to extinction a mere 27 years after Europeans first encountered the species. From what I’ve read, their behavior was their downfall: hunters quickly learned that when one was wounded, it would issue a distress call, causing other sea cows in the area to rush in and cluster protectively around the injured animal. Of course, that protective instinct just made it easier to kill a whole lot of them at once.
I don’t want to live in a world that has nothing but crows and dandelions.
I want to live in a world that also has orchids and hummingbirds.
I mourn that we seem to be unable to live on this planet without sharing it; that for humans to thrive, we seem to feel that no other species has the right to exist.
Let’s see how touchy-feely you are when dingos eat your baby!
:eek:
This is why I paid $25 a pound for a little piece of halibut. Tilapia and farm raised salmon is plentiful, an actual wild fish from the ocean scarce and getting scarcer.
Thank the bible-thumpers, the Catholics, the Republicans, the Duggars, the Chinese. Breed, breed, breed. Ravage the countryside. Expand. Build. Pollute.
I feel exactly the way you do, Savannah. Exactly. I’m glad I’m on the other end of the spectrum and not a kid any more. God knows what the world will be like for our kids and grandchildren. They should just start re-writing picture books right now. Get rid of flowers, animals, and nature - substitute videogames, computers, and cell phones.
No…why don’t you tell me about it? 
Not quite following the logic here. Aren’t wild foish from the ocean getting scarcer because people pay $25 a pound for their dead bodies?
On-topic, the eponymous hero of the Mike Baron comic book The Badger focused his energies on defending animals by attacking – sometimes quite savagely – people who harmed them.
In one story arc, he journeyed to Tasmania to defend the last Thylacine from a demonic cult that planned to kill the animal specifically because causing extinction is a sin so great it would give them the power to summon a potent demon.
I like that formulation, placing human-caused extinction high in the hierarchy of terrible wrongs.