I mean, for the sake of argument, what's the alternative? Protect abundant resources and use rare resources? Use rare and abundant without discrimination? Or don't use anything / huddle in a hole and die?

More seriously - I think we went very fast from my post of "If I have a unique hand-made-with-love gizmo I will cherish it" to "having things makes assholes" and "we love to willfully kill animals for no reason". And that's fine, we all have our priorities and passionate topics and axes to grind, but I'm a bit sad we didn't get to explore that specific interesting tidbit of human psychology before reducing it / switching to one of the top-10 massive issues of the day...

a species is not a thing. it's a concept - a thought. a concept doesn't do anything, because it's thoughts. so a species cannot kill an animal. a species cannot spend millions to protect. because thoughts cannot perform an action, because they're not a thing.

what does happen is a group of people, which is a thing, kills animals to the point of them being rare. then another, opposing group, spends millions to protect those remaining animals.

i'd expect something like this from a reddit post, where I often see, usually on redneck antivax subs i visit for entertainment, things like: reddit is hypocritical. because the redneck is not capable of comprehending that different people, with different opinions and actions both post on the website.

it's so backwards to think that, but such is some people's life.

I don't think it's necessarely backwards. If you spend your life almost hunting to extinction and then protecting a species, you'll always have something to do.