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Comment by timdiggerm | Hacker News Reader

Their food source was in steep decline due to worldwide commercial whale hunting; extinction is not surprising

They went the way of the Dodo. Wildlife that is not afraid of seamen get killed for food.

You're suggesting we killed them off? Source?

Can we stop this childish games, please? Wherever humanity appears large mammals and birds dissappeared, either directly or indirectly. In this case by predation ofthe food source. And this whole "what extinction, by what humans" is the "what Armenians" of developmental history of our species. The whole rhetoric device is just so boring, the dialog tree looped. It's just a sound of denial now, not really worth engaging, a noise disclosing the bunkered in mental state of the producer. It never added much to the conversation to begin with but now it's just..

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abb2313

We, collectively, are probably best served when asking questions doesn't result in an unrelated harangue.

In this case, the poster is asking about the claim that the orcas were hunted to be consumed by humans. You didn't provide any evidence that this is the case---and in fact suggested a reasonable alternative---so I suspect you also either question or deny that claim as well.

I think you've fallen into a trap. You've allowed the very people you are trying to rail against here to convince you that anyone asking questions is an enemy of yours and worthy of your derision.

As in every open source forum were people "demand" code, games and features-and where no effort was made to show a effort was made :"Linklist of reading up is welcome!"

I didn't object to the knowledge you shared. I objected to your gross mischaracterization of the person's question and ignorance of the context in which it was asked.

Sure but the gp was asking if we killed them off directly as opposed to killing off there food source.

I'm well aware of the anthropogenic effects on various animal populations especially megafauna, but it's a particular kind of claim to lump an oceanic apex predator with a flightless bird relegated to its island environment. Thanks for the paper, I'll be giving it a thorough read!

You won't find documented evidence for all of the species we've killed off, but that doesn't mean we haven't been doing it since prehistoric times. Within living memory (and just outside of it) humans have made many species extinct simply for fun. Buffalo had an extremely narrow escape. We've killed off species by not managing their numbers. We've killed off yet more because we saw them as pests. We've also killed off species to make way for others, or to kill a food source for a species (or race) that we didn't like. Extinction is something were fucking good at. Demanding documented evidence for it is a bit like the "clearing the decks" logical fallacy. I would err on the side of assuming that extinctions are caused by humans, rather than assuming that they're not.

However, if there is documented proof it would make interesting reading, so...

If you were to scroll down just a bit you would see my comment showing I am fully aware of anthropogenic biosphere changes. I asked for a source out of curiosity, not to set up a trap of some sort.

Yes we killed orcas like they were pests, with machine guns and depth charges. We did it for food and fishnets. https://www.sciencenews.org/archive/naval-war-declared-again...

I don't believe that's the case for the orcas in the article. I used to live in Eden, and they have a legendary reputation there, going back well into pre-colonial history. Killing them would be sacrilege. That's not to say that some weren't killed, but not on that scale.

I read that the eden whales were hunted by a Norwegian ship during ww2

I see, that makes sense. Perhaps primed by the article talking about interspecies cooperation I didn't imagine they would not only compete for food but steal it.

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