Sunday, September 21, 2008

Giant Lemurs

Did you ever hear about the giant lemurs of Australia? Don't bother now, they've been extinct for centuries. For thousands of years they roamed the land happily, doing whatever it is giant lemurs did... now, they are all gone. Wiped out. But by who? Who was responsible for this calamity? The Patriarchal European White Male? The soulless industrialist out of touch with nature? Christian missionaries with an inquisitorial zeal? No, no, and no. The giant lemurs were killed off pretty much single-handedly by the native aborigine people. Yes, that's right, the good and simple aborigines, living in harmony with nature and in the dreamtime, picked up their yo-yos and their boomerangs and hunted an entire species of large mammal to extinction.

I'm not even sure what the moral of this story is, other than the obvious.

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