The person who loves nature the most also becomes the biggest killer

Lionel Walter Rothschild is from the Rothschild family, the richest family in Europe and a giant in the financial industry. However, as the heir to a huge financial empire, his real interest is nature. He began collecting insects and birds when he was a child, and at the age of 7, he expressed his dream of opening a museum.

As his collection grew, in 1892, when Rothschild was 24 years old, he opened his first zoological museum to the public in his hometown of Tring, near London. However, he did not stop collecting, and even extended his "tentacles" to the whole world. This brought many discoveries to the scientific community, but also brought disaster to many species.

The former Rothschild Museum in Tring, now part of the Natural History Museum in London | Natural History Museum

Killer in the Name of Love

Over the next 40 years, Rothschild hired more than 400 people and sent them to every corner of the world to explore mountains, rivers, lakes and seas that were rarely visited by humans, just to collect various rare specimens. These people sent the specimens they found to Rothschild, and he and his assistants focused on studying these specimens and describing new species.

Alfred Minall was a carpenter and journeyman at the Rothschild estate who served as caretaker and taxidermist for the Rothschild's early collections and became the museum's first curator | Natural History Museum

This way of collecting at all costs created Rothschild's huge collection. During his lifetime, he collected animal specimens from 48 countries, including 2,000 mammals, 2,000 birds, 2 million butterflies and moths, 300,000 bird skins, and 200,000 bird eggs. The number is staggering.

Rothschild sent people around the world to collect animal specimens for him | Natural History Museum

Based on these collections, he and his assistants published more than 1,700 volumes of books and papers, describing more than 5,000 new species for the scientific community, including more than 200 species of insects, birds, mammals, etc. named after him, the most famous of which is the Rothschild's giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi).

Rothschild's giraffe | Woburn Safari

However, such an avid zoology enthusiast is also a heartbreaking killer.

In the 1890s, he sent his most capable assistant, Henry Palmer, to Hawaii. As an isolated island, Hawaii has its own ecosystem and many previously unknown bird species, including the large piping jay (Rhodacanthis palmeri) and the small piping jay (Rhodacanthis flaviceps), both of which belong to the genus Rhodacanthis.

The large-bellied jay is bright orange, while the small-bellied jay is yellow. They live together in the heights of acacia trees, feeding on nectar and fruits, and occasionally eating caterpillars. However, just as they looked at this distant visitor with a curious look, they were greeted by the black muzzle of a gun. In 1891, the last small-bellied jay was shot dead and entered the Rothschild collection; five years later, the last large-bellied jay also died at the hands of Palmer.

The top is a small pipistrelle, the bottom is a large pipistrelle | Frederick William Frohawk (1861-1946)

Over a period of more than 10 years, under Palmer's hunting, at least 9 species of Hawaiian birds were wiped out by Rothschild. The birds that once sang on the acacia trees would never have thought that their first flight across the ocean would be in the form of specimens, and the specimens they exhibited in foreign countries would become all the records of this species.

Rothschild's collection was not limited to specimens, he also enjoyed keeping rare animals in captivity, including dormice, emus, kangaroos, zebras and tortoises in Tring. He once sent explorer Charles Harris out to sea to collect tortoises for him and bring them back to raise.

He has a total of 144 live tortoises from the Galapagos and Aldabra. In order to prevent them from being hunted in their native habitats, he rented Aldabra Island for 10 years, which effectively stopped the decline in the number of tortoises. Of the six dormice he brought back from Hungary, several escaped from his estate and multiplied in large numbers. There are currently at least 10,000 in the UK, destroying farmland and buildings, and becoming a notorious invasive species in the area.

Capturing and transporting giant tortoises | Natural History Museum

Rothschild riding a tortoise | Natural History Museum

Rothschild not only raised animals collected from various continents, but also trained them. He believed that zebras could also be domesticated by humans and used as tools to pull carriages. However, despite many attempts, he still failed - zebras, which originally belonged to the African grasslands, were unruly and would not easily bow to humans. He had to tie carriages to the zebras when they stopped and take pictures, and even took the "zebra carriage" to Buckingham Palace.

A camouflaged zebra carriage photographed outside the Royal Albert Hall | Natural History Museum

From a book, see the long history

Rothschild's story was recorded in "A Brief History of Everything" written by American writer Bill Bryson. In this book, Bryson counted the important moments in the history of human science, such as the discovery of supernovas, the proposal of the theory of continental drift, the determination of species classification, and the discovery of genes and genomes.

However, Brian's book tells us that the long history of human science is not just a series of solemn milestones. There are often many interesting stories behind them: when the fossil of the hallucinogen was discovered, its head and tail were reversed, and its front and back were reversed. The spines on its back were thought to be long legs. Before Linnaeus' binomial classification was established, many animal and plant names were very vulgar, such as dandelions were called "urinals", "naked ladies" and "hound urine". Darwin played the piano for earthworms in his later years to study the effects of sound on them. One of the most precious skull fossils in anthropology was once used as a paperweight on the desk for many years...

A fossil of Hallucigenia spp. on display at the Smithsonian Institution | Jstuby / Wikimedia Commons

When describing how humans have come to this day, Blair also did not avoid the harm that humans have brought to the world. Behind Rothschild's millions of collections are the silent cries of wild animals and the end of one species after another. However, in that era, he was not the only killer in the name of love.

Hugh Cuming, a wealthy British collector, even customized a large ocean-going ship and hired a group of sailors to ride the wind and waves for him, just to bring back animal and plant specimens from all over the world; in 1939, two bird enthusiasts observed the Black-breasted Wormwood Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii), which was on the verge of extinction at the time. While they were ecstatic, they immediately chose to pull the trigger, making the last Black-breasted Wormwood Warbler a "out-of-print" collection that they were proud of.

The thousands of animals killed by the "Rothschilds" are only the tip of the iceberg of human killing. Many more animals died because of human recklessness. In the 1680s, in Mauritius, the dull, flightless dodo became a target of hunting for fun by outsiders. Their eggs were also destroyed by dogs brought by humans, and even the last dodo specimen was burned because of mold. We can only speculate what the dodo looked like when it was alive from some remaining body parts and historical records.

Head of a dodo painted in 1638, possibly the last painting of a living dodo | Cornelis Saftleven (1607-1681)

In 1741, an expedition ship crashed on the Komando Peninsula, and humans discovered the giant dugongs living there. They were huge and gentle, just like mermaids in fairy tales. But it took only 27 years for these 10-ton sea beasts to be discovered, hunted, and extinct.

19th century drawing of a giant dugong | Henry Wood Elliott / Wikimedia Commons

In the last few pages of the book, Bryson sighed helplessly: "We may be the most intelligent, we may be the most intelligent creatures, and at the same time, we may be the most terrible nightmare of all creatures."

What humans have brought to other creatures on Earth is the sixth mass extinction, with 140,000 species heading toward extinction every year, and many of these species have already become extinct before they were discovered by humans. If humans continue to destroy other species, can humans survive the catastrophe?

References

1. A Brief History of Everything by Bill Bryson, translated by Yan Weiming

2.https://family.rothschildarchive.org/people/102-lionel-walter-walter-rothschild-1868-1937

3.https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/walter-rothschild-a-curious-life.html

4.https://www.lindahall.org/lionel-walter-rothschild/

5.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Rothschild,_2nd_Baron_Rothschild

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