Now They’re Saying the Dodo Bird Went Extinct Because Climate Change

I only saw this article because it popped up on the front page of Google News as a top story (meaning it’s an agenda that’s getting promoted).

Headline: Climate Change and Island Species: How the Dodo Birds Went Extinct

…Seriously?

How many of you remember learning about the dodo bird in elementary school? Sure, it’s public school, but still. I remember back in what, third grade? The teacher would tell us about how the dodo bird, having never seen humans before the 1500s and 1600s, never fought back and was hunted to extinction by people who settled on their islands. The birds supposedly couldn’t fly and built their nests on the ground, making them pretty easy targets.

It’s a story that’s been told for hundreds of years and is the main reason the name “Dodo” has become synonymous with dumb.

Well, apparently… not anymore.

Now, along with our “endangered” polar bears drowning left and right (thank you so much Al Gore), we have outlets trying to pass off the idea that climate change is what killed the dodo.

Mind you, the headline is not actually what the article even says. It’s a clever semantics game hidden in the last paragraph of the story.

The dodo bird was a large flightless bird that once lived on the Mascarene Islands (later re-named Mauritius) of the Indian Ocean. However, the discovery of the three islands in the 1500s, and their colonization in the 1600s, caused dramatic ecological changes that eventually led to the dodo birds’ extinction. In fact, the last confirmed sighting of a dodo was in 1681 and by the end of the 17th century there were none left.

“Dramatic ecological changes?” You mean like being hunted and eaten into extinction?

Gee, that’s not exactly the same as “climate change,” now is it?

The sad part is, most people skim the news these days. When this headline pops up in their Google News feed as one of today’s top stories, they will see it and probably not even actually take the time to read the story. The headline will just lodge itself in their grey brain matter somewhere and become valid, rewriting history without further thought.

Then again, who knows anymore. Everything is so screwed up and the dodo bird has always looked pretty ridiculous anyway. These people are the same ones who can’t decide whether Pluto is a planet or if a brontosaurus really exists and we’re supposed to sit around hanging on their every word about things that happened a really long time ago. As Morpheus said, “What is real? How do you define real?”

(Hopefully not by Google News headlines.)