- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32466314
Context:
By the early 1920s, the king penguin population in South Georgia and the Falklands was nearly wiped out by whalers on these islands. As the Falklands and South Georgia had no trees to use for firewood, the whalers burned millions of oily, blubber-rich penguins as fuel. Constant fires were required to boil whale blubber for extraction of the oil. The whalers also used penguin oil for lamps, heating and cooking, in addition to eating the birds and their eggs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_penguin#Distribution_and_habitat
Although I couldn’t find any source about the Falklands, the same definetly happend in New Zealand:
So I think it’s very likely that it also happend at the opposite side of Antarctica.
Wow, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given what I already knew about the history and present-day reality of humanity’s interactions with animals, but I’m still surprised.
It’s notable that on the island your links describe, the entire penguin “industry” and several shipwrecks’ worth of dead sailors were the product of one moderately-successful entrepreneur’s ambitions, that he received widespread condemnation at the time, and that this condemnation was not enough to stop him.