Extinction of species in Europe during WW2?

[bertamingo]

Hi folks, I read it in many books and articles that many rare species of birds went extinct on Pacific islands after the warships docking by them brought mice and rats that subsequently ate out all eggs and chicks. Did something similar happened in Europe due to the war? Even if at a smaller scale because Europe is not as isolated and vulnerable as those islands. Thanks!

[Hanny]

similar covers lot of ground, Uk slaughtered all/most dangerous animals held in zoos, dairy herds that produced low milk returns were slaughtered and replaced with frisians with high milk returnsand pets had their own Holocaust. http://hildakean.com/?p=3034 The British Cat and Dog Massacre

Not sure when , but italy and others in the Med used nets to catch migrating birds for food, on an industrial scale and threatened some species.

[bertamingo]

Thank you for the information, it's sth I hadn't heard of before. From what you said it can be deduced that species extinction in WW2 Europe is a real possibility, the war probably wiped out some bird species just like it did on the Pacific.

[SloveneLiberal]

Bertamingo i doubt some species went really extinct during WW2 in Europe. Europe is not an island on which "new" animals could come and drive out old species - nature is of course doing this blindly. I can not also imagine why would somebody during the war try to intentionaly hunt down whole animal species.

[bertamingo]

Bertamingo i doubt some species went really extinct during WW2 in Europe. Europe is not an island on which "new" animals could come and drive out old species - nature is of course doing this blindly. I can not also imagine why would somebody during the war try to intentionaly hunt down whole animal species.

Hi SloveneLiberal, greetings! I appreciate your ID name . For the topic, yeah Europe is far less vulnerable than the Pacific islands, and the chances of whole species going extinct are significantly less. If I were to guess a reason for the situation to indeed occur, I'd say maybe firstly as Hanny mentioned, some industrial scale hunting of migratory birds and other wildlife during wartime to overcome the famine, similar to but much faster than what the passenger pigeons had faced in the US; and secondly the said species could be already in serious decline or even on the verge of extinction before the war, and the military actions/pollutions/habitat loss etc. just proved to be the last straw to break the camel's back.

[SloveneLiberal]

Hm i see. Well animals also flee the war if they have a chance of course. For example wild animals from Bosnia like wolfs, foxes and bears migrated to Slovenia when there was a war in Bosnia. Whole Europe was not in war also in the time of WW2. And it is of course much easier to migrate on the continent than it is from island to island.

[Peter89]

The Cold war on the other hand, let some species to breed.

Rabbit à la Berlin is a touching movie

[Nautilus]

The nastiest times for wildlife are not actual wars (because the destruction is aimed at population and industrial centers) but insurgencies. Thousands of armed men in the wild -poorly supplied and outside military discipline- usually wreck havoc during their quest for bush meat.

The Romanian/Black Sea basin Drought of 1946 and the anti-Soviet insurgency from 1945 to mid-1950s brought a lot of destruction among large game animals. In 1950, first post-war year of accurate statistics of wildlife, forest rangers reported no more than 950 brown bears in Romania. From the 1980s to present, their number is in the high thousands.