{"id":24996,"date":"2017-09-27T13:57:38","date_gmt":"2017-09-27T18:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=24996"},"modified":"2017-09-24T14:08:37","modified_gmt":"2017-09-24T19:08:37","slug":"cass-caitlin-the-once-great-auk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=24996","title":{"rendered":"Cass, Caitlin – The Once Great Auk"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Once Great Auk<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get depressed about humanity? One easy way to do it is to learn in detail about how an animal was hunted completely to extinction. Granted, these days there are some basic protections and people actively fighting back against that sort of thing from happening, but back in the 1800’s, boy howdy were people stupid about it. The Great Auk would have been fiercely protected today too, that much is obvious. It’s goofy, harmless and adorable, which would get the letter writing\/political campaigns really going. They were roughly three feet tall, couldn’t fly and could barely walk (Caitlin doesn’t state this explicitly but I got the impression that it was named for the noise it made as it was stumbling around). These Auks didn’t have any defenses against humanity and never really had a chance against them. I won’t ruin the depressing tale of how the last few Great Auks in the world died, but I will marvel once again that humanity has managed to survive this long, seemingly in spite of our best efforts. This is a grim story, but hey, where else are you going to be able to see Great Auks doing their thing? And who knows, maybe if enough people read stories like this we really will collectively learn from our mistakes and stop doing stupid shit all the time. A guy can dream… $3<\/p>\n

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Website The Once Great Auk Want to get depressed about humanity? One easy way to do it is to learn in detail about how an animal was hunted completely to extinction. Granted, these days there are some basic protections and people actively fighting back against that sort of thing from happening, but back in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4899,6086,6174],"class_list":["post-24996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-caitlin-cass","tag-great-moments-in-western-civilization","tag-the-once-great-auk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24999,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24996\/revisions\/24999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}