Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
is anyone else feeling fucking insane about extinct animals
thylacines were targeted by settlers in australia claiming they were hunting their sheep to have an excuse to hunt them. thylacines weren’t big enough to hunt sheep. they left the settlers and their livestock alone. thylacines were an incredibly unique and fascinating animal. benjamin had the misfortune to go extinct in a time when zoos were just concrete and wire boxes. she died because someone forgot to let her in at night and she froze to death on the ground. dodo birds had no natural predators and didn’t know to be afraid when colonialists on mauritius began to hunt them. they weren’t stupid, they were fantastically suited to their environment. they were the second biggest pigeons we know of (the first was their close relative, the rodrigues solitaire, also extinct). it wasn’t fair to them. the last kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō spent its life calling out for a mate that would never show up. can you imagine how fucking lonely that would be. and i know this bird didn’t have the same emotional response that we do but can you fucking imagine being the last of your kind, all the others hunted away by predators that were never there before. and my favourite bird i work with, tia, is a citron crested cockatoo and every time i hold him i think about how fucking close we are to losing his entire species and i lose my fucking mind. the last count of his species in the wild was in 2012 and it came up with 563 individuals. this bird is so much to me and there’s only a few left in the world. in less than a century his species could be extinct. every time i hold him i just want to cry because i could be holding a species that might not exist within my lifetime. extinct animals make me so fucking emotional. i dont know. listen to deuteronomy 2:10 by the mountain goats
Me too. There used to be parrots in North America. There used to be passenger pigeons. There used to be great auks. We live in an impoverished world. I want to throw up when I think about it.
