7/30/2019 84082791 Strategic Management Issues and Cases209

1/1

CASE STUDIES 197

The Sad Fate of the Dodo

What creature has ever been subjected to more ridicule and derision? (Stephen Jay

Gould)

Some see the dodo as the ultimate lesson in extinction. It rivals the dinosaur as a

symbol of how not to survive. The phrase dead as a dodo has entered the lan-

guage as a damning way to describe any project that has no hope of realization

totally dead, and for ever. First sighted by Portuguese or Dutch sailors in the forests

of the island of Mauritius in the late 1500s, the dodo was totally extinct by 1681.

There are now no complete specimens of the dodo, so what we know about it

is based on travellers tales, drawings and painstaking scientific research. Scientists

believe that the dodo evolved from a bird capable of flight into a flightless one.

When the ancestors of the dodo landed on Mauritius they found a habitat plenti-ful in food and no predators. There was no need to expend the energy necessary

for flight, so the bird stayed on the ground and, eventually, the flightless dodo

evolved. However, when sailors landed on its island, the flightless bird had no means

of escape. Indeed, escape was an alien concept to the bird, because it had never

experienced predators.

So innocent and lacking in fear was it in the presence of the new arrivals that

the sailors took its equanimity as evidence of stupidity. The dodo eventually

became synonymous with slow, stupid and fat. Indeed, its name has been linked

with this perception. Three origins have been suggested. The one most favoured

is that the word dodo comes from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning sluggard.The second is that it may derive from the Portuguese doudo, meaning foolish or

simple. Finally, there is the possibility the word is a variant of the Dutch dodaer, a

seventeenth-century term used by sailors, meaning fat arse.

The dodo was hunted as easy prey, though it was not considered particularly

palatable. In the words of the eminent historian of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould,

What could be easier to catch than a lumbering, giant, flightless pigeon? It was

hunted relentlessly, with sailors killing up to fifty birds at a time. Destruction of its

forest habitat cut off its food supply. The animals habitat was further ravaged by

the animals the sailors brought with them cats, pigs, monkeys and rats which

pillaged the dodos ground nests of eggs.A non-flying bird, a deterministic theory of evolution suggests, cannot hope to

survive in such an environment. The extinction of the dodo is frequently cited as

a prime example of natural selection. Recently, however, there have been new inter-

pretations of the dodos story. New evidence suggests that the dodo was not fat

and slow-moving, that it was actually lithe and active. Rather than demonstrating

the weakness of the dodo, its defenders suggest that the birds fate illustrates the

irresponsibility of those who disrupted its habitat. According to Stephen Jay

Gould, the dodo was the first animal driven to death in modern times by human

agency, a harbinger of far worse to come. The dodos fate has even been read as

a fable about the negative impact of human beings on the earths eco-systems.

To add insult to injury, many commentators denigrate the dodo as doomed to

extinction by its own inadequacies and by the species deterioration brought about