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ENVIRONMENT
Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction
Barbara Allen
Reaktion Books, $49.99<\/p>\n
If you care about animal extinction then reading this book could cause you to weep. For author Barbara Allen, writing Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds was an upsetting experience. \u201cI wrote this book accompanied by many tears. I could not stay dry-eyed reading about the slaughter of the great auk, the seemingly endless shootings of the passenger pigeon, the destruction of habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, feelings of grief and outrage are unavoidable when reading about how these species, along with others such as the dodo and thylacine, have disappeared due to human encroachment, exploitation and sheer viciousness.<\/p>\n
Human beings are both the kindest and cruellest species, and this dichotomy is expressed no more plainly than in the way we treat other animals. So many of the 31 species described by Allen in this book were lost due to the destructive aspect of our nature.<\/p>\n
Allen includes contemporary expressions of self-satisfaction, even glee at the wholesale slaughter of vulnerable species, as if animals that could be killed without effort somehow did not deserve to live. Species that evolved on remote islands, such as the dodo, were easy prey for the humans who circumnavigated the globe in the age of exploration. \u201cHaving never encountered humans before,\u201d she writes, \u201csome of the creatures did not realise the danger they posed. Many colonists labelled such behaviour, this absence of fear, as evidence of them being \u2018stupid\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Benjamin, the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo in 1933.Credit: David Fleay Trustees<\/p>\n
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A 1909 report commenting on a thylacine kept at London Zoo stated that these animals evidently were \u201cuntameable\u201d yet not intelligent enough to \u201cknow what they fear\u201d. Allen describes how the last, neglected thylacine in captivity died in 1936 from exposure and malnutrition in a freezing cold concrete enclosure at Hobart Zoo. The thylacine<\/a> was not recognised by the Tasmanian government as a threatened species until 1966.<\/p>\n