' Some of these hunters, writes Flores, may have genuinely believed that these animal populations were inexhaustible, but plenty understood the likely consequences of their actions. Decades after the slaughter, a hunter named Frank Meyer reflected on the origins of “buffalo fever”: “Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, and anyone else…. I think maybe that is the way it was.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/08/17/the-nature-trade-wild-new-world-market-in-birds/