5 ms·
It was a deliberate attempt to deprive Native Americans of their historical means of support. You can't besiege a Native American city because they had already
by sidewndr46 2y ago
It was a deliberate attempt to deprive Native Americans of their historical means of support. You can't besiege a Native American city because they had already been pushed off their historical lands. But if you can eliminate a major source of food for them, it's possibly even more effective.
In general people under-estimate the capability of humanity to eradicate other forms of life. We've managed to eliminates organisms as plentiful as things like rinderpest for example. Large animals are actually easier. Were it not for a last minute change, almost all forms of whales would have been extinct in the 20th century. We've been the most advanced life form on Earth for a long time, possibly even before modern humans arrived. But in the past 1000 years or so we really became the most dominant life form. Our population has exploded and we can pretty much push out any other form of life we choose.
- snowwrestler 2y agoLatest estimates I recall are that humans and our livestock together comprise over 90% of the total mass of land animals globally. All wild animals together are less than 10%. The mental picture of a wild Earth on which humans live is now outdated. The Earth has become a human place, with essentially some open-air zoos containing the few wild animals we have chosen to not kill.
- gus_massa 2y agoxkcd 1338: Land Mammals https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://explainxkcd.com/1338/ https://explainxkcd.com/1338/
- 0xcafecafe 2y agoBacteria still outweigh us a thousand to one and that's not counting those already in our bodies is a great alt-text as well.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoBacteria aren't really animals though.
- gus_massa 2y agoI remember a joke posted in a old thread here. Paraphrasing: > Eukaryotes are the method that Prokaryotes use for space travel.
- Brybry 2y agoLand insects/terrestrial arthropods might match that https://phys.org/news/2023-02-global-combined-weight-insects-arthropods.html https://phys.org/news/2023-02-global-combined-weight-insects... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9897674/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9897674/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lalalandland 2y agoInsects comprise a total weight to about 1 billion tons.(1) Which is roughly the same as the weight of all people and farm animals on Earth combined. (1) https://www.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-change/article-730523 https://www.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-change/article...
- jurenbert 2y ago[dead]
- buerkle 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust is an interesting example of eradicating an organism. From massive swarms of locusts to none in under 30 years.
- fanatic2pope 2y agoAlong the same lines is the passenger pigeon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon
- cyberax 2y ago> It was a deliberate attempt to deprive Native Americans of their historical means of support. No, it was not. The bison population collapse was not something expected or planned. One year the bison simply disappeared (1882). The bison ecosystem in North America was deeply unnatural. Bison are fast-replicating herbivores that don't have any natural predators! This only happened because Natives exterminated almost all the large predators. Such systems almost always go through boom-bust cycles, and that's exactly what happened. The migration patterns were disturbed by railroads, and that likely led to the spread of the Texas tick fever and anthrax among the bison population. They have around 90% death rate, and that's what caused the population collapse. However, this time the population did not recover by itself. > But if you can eliminate a major source of food for them, it's possibly even more effective. It's the same nonsense as giving smallpox-impregnated blankets used to exterminate populations.
- onychomys 2y agoDo you have any evidence for the claim that it was disease rather than the immense slaughter?
- cyberax 2y agoYes. There are multiple papers written about this, here's a nice overview article: https://www.nacdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bisoncollapse.pdf https://www.nacdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bisoncoll... There was overhunting of bison, but normally overhunting leads to a gradual decline of the population (and we've seen that with overfishing). The bison near-extinction happened within _one_ year. The hunters in 1883 were waiting in vain for the bison to come.
- sidewndr46 2y agofrom page 108: Removing 840,000 animals from 4.5 million leaves them a good 3 million short of extinct. But Texas tick fever has an 81% death rate.11 Removing 81% from 4.5 million leaves just 855,000. Shooting b 840,000 of them leaves N 15,000, which is a lot like b 25,177 (Fig. 1) Their own conclusions was that absent hunting, there would have been around 855,000 bison that year. Hunting reduced the remaining population after tick fever by 99.2%! Ignoring this is the equivalent of suggesting it was not an iceberg that sunk the titanic, but a lack of buoyancy.
- Miraste 2y agoThis is true of macro life forms, but rinderpest is a bad example. It's one of only two diseases we have ever been able to eliminate. Both of them were viruses-we've never stopped a bacterial disease, and with the increasing failure of antibiotics, that's only going to get worse.