At least some of us actually give a shit these days and things are at least tried to mitigate the issue.
The Romans basically made lions extinct in Europe after hundreds of thousands of years of them being there because they liked watching them kill each other in the arena (or watch people hunt them in the arena).
We almost lost whales in the 19th century because people wanted oil to light lamps.
This is the size of an elephant herd in Tanzania in the 1950s: