PASSENGER PIGEON WIPED OUT

In the recital of man's inhumanity toward other creatures, no tale is more shocking than that of the passenger pigeon. It was easy, really. By 1855 New York City alone ate 300,000 pigeons a year. All over the United States & populated Canada, professional trappers, shooters & pickers flourished, speeding their catches to market the new-fangled railway trains. Their nesting locations in Michigan alone were said to have yielded 2,400.000 adult birds & a thousand TONS of squabs. This taking of the young hastened the bird's extinction.
Also, between 1866 & 1876, 12 million brooding pigeons were slaughtered, which meant that their young died of abandonment if they too weren't taken for meat. By the early 1900's only a few pathetic captives survived. The last passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.