: : Yeah, it must feel really good knowing you have the potential power to extinguish a species, out there with your gun, that is if you don't do anything even stupider with it...: I may have the power to but I wont extinguish a species because then I wouldn't be able to hunt any more and there would be no animals. Why would i want to do that?
SDF: The laws of population biology didn't care, that no particular hunter wanted to extinguish the passenger pigeon. The fact of the matter was, and is, that the predatory hunting of human beings working separately combined to drive the passenger pigeon into extinction together, just as humanity almost wiped out the whales the same way, just as the rhinoceros will become an animal found only zoos in a few years, just as the mountain gorillas of Rwanda (& most other apes) are doomed to near-extinction the same way. And do keep in mind the difficulty of regenerating a species from the tiny numbers to be warehoused in zoos.
I'm sure if you found all the rhino hunters in a few years, they would all say "It wasn't me that extinguished the rhino," but if you add them all up, they did it.
"Walk lightly upon the earth"
-Gary Snyder
