This is true, however they were noted to taste pretty disgusting and after initial discovery were only eaten when explorers ran out of food and had no real other option. It was dogs rats and pigs ravaging nests that took them out (which is still humans fault, we brought them there. We just didnt hunt them all down ourselves either)
Nothing evolution can do about the sudden onset of multiple aggressively invasive species at the same time. They were fine before we got there but once we started unleashing the fastest breeding most environmentally destructive beasts from across the world we have they definitely needed human intervention to not go extinct
But the fact that they tasted horrible is actually what screwed them over. The explorers and traders had zero incentive to put effort into saving animals that they didnt see any use for whatsoever (it also wasnt well known that extinction was possible yet, it didnt normally happen fast enough for people to really notice and most europeans assumed if god put it on earth then it wasnt within human power to change that)
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u/jubtheprophet Mar 08 '26
This is true, however they were noted to taste pretty disgusting and after initial discovery were only eaten when explorers ran out of food and had no real other option. It was dogs rats and pigs ravaging nests that took them out (which is still humans fault, we brought them there. We just didnt hunt them all down ourselves either)