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once lived in huge numbers around the North Atlantic—was also exterminated in a determined campaign of slaughter. Once clubbed to death, the bodies would be plunged into boiling water, their feathers torn out (for stuffing pillows and mattresses, as well as adorning hats), while the carcass would be boiled for its oil (used for lighting lamps) and the remainder used to fuel the fires that powered the whole ghastly enterprise.23 Ship crews would move onto remote islands with the sole purpose of killing as many birds as possible during the summer months. Even on the brink of extinction, the hunting continued: The last breeding pair of great auks were beaten to death in Iceland on June 3, 1844, and their single remaining egg was broken.24

Early seafarers were not exactly sentimental about the creatures they encountered. William Dampier, writing about the fur seals he saw on Juan Fernández island in 1709, marveled at their beauty, agility, and grace, “how they lie at the top of the water playing and sunning themselves” as he put it. But like everyone, Dampier soon got down to business. “A blow on the nose soon kills them,” he added helpfully. “Large ships might here load themselves with seal-skins and Traneoyl [oil]; for they are extraordinary fat.”25 And large ships did just that, reducing the island’s enormous colonies of seals down to an eventual grand total of just 200 individuals. One American naval captain related in 1891 how the shooting of fur seal females at sea left their offspring on the shore to starve: “Thousands of dead and dying pups were scattered over the rookeries, while the shorelines were lined with emaciated, hungry little fellows, with their eyes turned towards the sea uttering plaintive cries for their mothers, which were destined never to return.”26

Species after species was relentlessly pursued. Walruses were boiled down for their oil. Giant tortoises were seized in raids on the Galápagos Islands and kept alive by being turned on their backs in ships’ holds for months at a time before being eaten for their meat. In “one of the great wildlife exterminations of colonial times,” as marine historian Callum Roberts puts it, an original population of 50–100 million hawksbill turtles in the Caribbean was reduced to just a few thousand (it is still critically endangered worldwide).27 Sea otters, which once swam in their millions in Pacific coastal waters from Mexico to the Arctic, were reduced to fewer than two thousand by 1911. As industrialization proceeded, the depletion of whole areas could speed up: When seal colonies were first discovered in the remote South Shetland Islands in 1820, a quarter of a million were killed and the population brought to near-extinction within just three years.28

All this is in the past, of course. But its impacts are still very much with us, and in many different ways the global slaughter continues. There are no large wild animals left on our planet in anything like the abundance they once enjoyed. Those few hunted species that remain are still under intense pressure; it is as if humanity has learned nothing from past exterminations. Today the extinction of the bluefin tuna is an imminent threat: Quotas set at the time of writing by the sadly misnamed International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas are high enough to permit fishing boats to catch every single adult bluefin during next year’s season.29 The fish don’t have much of a fighting chance: Illegal spotter planes guide industrial fleets to wherever the last few thousand individuals can be found.30 Nor have the economics changed much since the days of whaling: The trading conglomerate Mitsubishi was recently accused of stockpiling frozen bluefin in expectation of a post-extinction price bonanza.31 With individual fish worth up to $100,000 on the Tokyo sushi market, the tragedy of the commons plays out anew every time the tuna fleets set sail.

The destruction of fish habitat is also routinely ignored in the interests of short-term profit. The North Sea off England’s east coast, for example, was not always