It’s crazy to think that we almost brought a class of animals to extinction, all because we had the arrogance to read in the dark.
Americans killed off the bison because indians liked them.
That wins. The pettiest motive.
Rome vs Carthage. Romans beat them up then poured tons of salt on the fields so that they could never grow crops and rebuild. Just to be mean.
The salting was metaphorical in Rome’s case, but both were deliberate genocides. It wasn’t about “liking” buffalo, the extermination campaign was started because the Plains tribes needed buffalo. The public wouldn’t tolerate an outright genocide, but they would tolerate the destruction of the herds.
At least it’s been brought back from extinction thanks to conservation efforts.
We’ve killed off many other species simply by existing and expanding. And even more with what we do to the environment constantly.
Wait till you lean how many species go extinct per year.
We’re currently in the middle of a mass extinction era, mostly caused by human industrialization
Fun fact in case anyone didn’t already know but the diesel engine was originally powered by whale oil but it’s such a resilient engine that it was later fueled by what was once considered a waste byproduct of gasoline refinement.
My understanding is it can actually run on a pretty wide variety of fuels (in general; not every specific model can run on a wide variety).
Biodiesel was gonna be the next big thing before EVs started gaining traction. Arnold drove around a Hummer that was modified to run on vegetable oil while he was governor.
I was always told kerosene and diesel, in that order, were the products of interest. Standard Oil didn’t know what to do with gasoline because it was considered too dangerous and explosive to transport, so they bankrolled the development of the Otto cycle to power their own equipment.
It was originally designed to run on peanut oil.
Whale oil was also used as a raw material in chemical industry for a lot of things where it was replaced by mineral oil too, e.g. in the production of tensides for washing powder, and not at least was also used for the production of margarine, as fat was rare in the early 20th century.
It was used in automatic transmission fluid until the 1970s.
And perfume as well, at least from what I remember from Anno
But that’s made from ambergrease which is produced in the digestive system of a whale and can be found once in a while on the beach too.
That’s the bases for the power system in the Dishonored video game series.
Similarly, ice was saved from massacre when refrigeration was invented.
There was a railway built to my town which had a big industry supplying ice to the large cities in the south. There was a long conveyor belt built into the lake leading to a large building stuffed with saw dust that kept ice well into the summer. It created a lot of winter work for the locals that dried up after refrigeration was invented. The railway lost its usefulness and also got torn up. And now the bay doesn’t even freeze anymore.
When did the bay stop freezing?
Fun fact to add: it gave farmers a winter income, right when they weren’t busy.
It’s been less and less for the last ever. It did freeze over solid, as did all the Great Lakes, about 10 years ago but that seems to be an outlier. Now there’s been not much by the shore let alone any for ice fishers. I’m talking about Georgian Bay, off Lake Huron.
Wow, how did the bay know that we wouldn’t need its ice any more? Nature’s miracles never cease!
And then the drive towards petroleum started. We traded one terrible earth destroying thing for another.
Horses were saved by cars too. Before ICE cars, horses were treated like shit and worked to death.
