Bored Panda
JUN 27, 2022

Kyhan reply

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Fun fact: the giant tortoise was so delicious, it caused not only itself to be hunted to extinction, but also the dodo.
Giant tortoise meat was supposedly better tasting than chicken. Its fat tasted better spread on bread than butter. Also, it was the perfect food for sailors at the time, as their bladders stored 1 litre of purified water, and they could survive without food in hibernation for almost a whole year in the hull of a ship. Not to mention, because they evolved without humans, they were easy to hunt. You could tie one to your back, and roll another to the ship and they would just let you. It was so delicious, they went unrecorded for a long time because expeditions to bring living samples of wildlife to Europe kept eating them on the way.
Conversely, the dodo, while as easily captured by sailors, tasted awful. It was completely unpalatable. HOWEVER, one day, someone discovered if you cooked dodo meat in the more delicious tortoise fat, it tasted just like chicken. So now, sailors were hunting a few tortoises at a time for their fat and water, storing them, and then hunting dodos on the daily.
Overhunting, plus the introduction of rats to the environment (because sailors) which would eat eggs, led go the population to decline at a rate they could not breed to keep up, leading to both animals going extinct.
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