Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

David, what do you know about the dodo?

The bird, I assume you were talking about.

I mean, I know that it was and is no longer.

Yeah, because it has gone extinct, like the name of this episode.

So I feel like the Dodo, of course, has become a poster child for extinction.

And that's something that the philosopher Tom Vendoren talks about in his book, Flightways.

And the idea is like, yeah, we know the dodo went extinct to the extent that we even have phrases like dead as a dodo.

But I learned a lot more about the Dodo from Van Doren's book.

Okay, I haven't read this book, but I do want to know what you learned, Ellie.

Okay. The Dodoos are large, flightless

birds who made their homes exclusively on the beautiful island of Mauritius, a tropical island

in East Africa. And prior to human settlement of Mauritius, they would have had ample fruit to

eat and had no other terrestrial animals to compete with, let alone any predators. Like, life was sweet for the dodo on the island of Mauritius.

But then in 1598, the Dutch East India Company started using the beautiful island of Mauritius

as a pasture and breeding ground for livestock.

And they also started using the native meat that they found there, including the dodoes,

but also tortoises,

other local birds for food. So we've got a situation where the dodoes suddenly have these

...