Jim,

“I honestly don't think that too many animals on this planet have been hunted to extiction (sic).”

I can’t imagine on what basis you form this opinion. It seems quite likely that mammoths, and many other large manuals, were pushed to extinction by the Native Americans who arrived on the North and South American continents with the technology of the Clovis and Folsom fluted pro-jectile point. We know they hunted mammoth from the blades using this technology found in the bones of the fossils, and then the mammoths disappeared.

Not exactly cause and effect, but a believable scenario—maybe even an hypothesis--with lots of evidence supporting it. The First Americans may have taken only “what they –needed;” and they may have “had very great respect for the creatures that sustained them,” but that really can’t be known—there are no written records and deciphering the meanings of 10,000 year old petro-glyphs is far beyond our abilities. And they did, apparently, push these animals to extinction anyway.

I think the contribution of sports hunting to extinction is about zero. Hunters don’t want to deal with creatures that are so rare you can hardly find any. Today they deal primarily with deer and elk, nuisance animals who are very far from extinction.

Forget “Lo, the poor Indian.”

Bob