Unfortunately, this unusual tameness was used to their disadvantage: as Darwin notes, men “frequently killed them in the evening, by holding out a piece of meat in one hand, and in the other a knife ready to stick them.”

https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Dusicyon_australis/

    • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 days ago

      Nearly happened to the Galapagos tortoise too, but they were saved just in the nick of time when conservation efforts got serious in the 1970s. They used to be a favorite of English sailors who would stack them upside-down in their ships because they would stay alive for months and provide a ready freshly killed meal whenever they were hungry. The “Age of Discovery” is basically European colonialists committing unspeakable crimes upon every new habitat and population they stumbled across.

      • userofnames [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        8 days ago

        o damn that is quite recently, for the dodo it was done at the end of the 17th century. it only took about 30 years for the dutch to destroy such a magnificent bird

        And apparently they didn’t even enjoy it; the taste of the meat was bad.