Extinction Infringes on my Civil Rights

You heard me. When some selfish numbnuts corporation or collusion of businesses and politics or just plain-old short-sighted human beings drive some species to extinction, that infringes on my rights.

Namely, my right to eat that species.

I’ve eaten bear, deer, oysters, ostrich, frogs, turtles, rabbit, pheasant, squid, alligator, octopus, fish, snails, clams, snakes, a variety fish eggs, birds eggs, crustaceans, and numerous other animals I was unaware of found in Chinese groceries or accidentally eaten, like the ants that got into my protein powder that one time and I was too cheap to throw it out.

But you know what I’ve always wanted to try? Passenger pigeon. Apparently, passenger pigeons tasted really really yummy and there were tons of them flocking about North America, decimating forests wherever they landed, but I’ll never find out how yummy they were. You know why? Because people living here in the early 1900s selfishly killed and ate them all. This was the LARGEST BIRD POPULATION IN NORTH AMERICA at the time, and these fat-ass ignorant hicks ATE EVERY LAST #$%&ING ONE OF THEM!!!

F.U. Lost generation. History should rename you the “Fat Selfish Piggy Generation.” Jerks.

It’s not fair that I don’t get to eat passenger pigeon. It’s also not fair that my kids won’t get to eat tuna sushi, since ever-elevating environmental mercury levels will eventually render all tuna inedible. All so President George Bush the II’s friends can keep dumping mercury into the environment and spend the cost savings on solid-gold toilet seats and air-conditioned doghouses.

Then there’s the Dodo, apparently it wasn’t yummy at all. It was just dumb, and fun to kill because dumb sailors liked to bonk living things with clubs and feed them to dogs and rats. There must have been something really satisfying about bonking Dodos on the head with clubs, but I’ll never know, because those stupid sailors selfishly bonked them all for their own amusement. I bet that if the dodos were alive today, studies would show that they make great stress relievers.¹

Until the 1950s the Gros Michel banana was the banana of choice for the world. It was really tasty, vastly superior to the comparatively tasteless cavendish bananas we eat today. The Gros Michel was wiped out by a fungus. They still exist, but cannot be grown for sale any longer. Generation X will never know how yummy Gros Michel bananas were.

Recently I found out that Cavendish Bananas Could Disappear in 5-10 Years thanks to the same fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel. A fungus is also killing all the frogs, a fungus propagating because of global warming. Frog legs taste good. I get them every time I’m at the Chinese buffet, but my children won’t get to eat frogs because the Baby Boomers thought it was more important for Exxon Mobil to rake in profits the world has never seen before.

Passenger pigeons, whales, eventually tuna all seafood, frogs, and bananas, our menus are shrinking with each decade. Just like the menus of the Eastern Islanders shrank on their way to extinction. From digging through their garbage dumps, we see a dietary digression: first the big livestock are eaten, then they turn to nibbling on rats, then they turn to digging up corpses to cannibalize, and finally starve to death.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We got buffalo and alligators back on the menu. Let’s get the other species back on there too. I hope that one day I’ll be able to sit down to a guilt-free meal of blue whale with my children because the species was allowed to make a comeback.

If you don’t care about environmentalism for the sake of saving the Earth, then care about it for the sake of having variety when you go out to eat.

¹ This is an exaggeration made for comedic effect. There was some dodo-bonking going on by sailors, but mostly the dodos were wiped out by all the invasive species, like rats and dogs, the sailors brought with them.

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