What fuels such savagery against human and animal kind? What, but the promise of great profits, the lure of luxury items, fine ivory jewelry and statues, or healing potions, gloves and seal skin coats, and free slave labor leading to the amassing of great wealth; all of which seem available merely for the taking. So great is the abundance and so easy the conquest that the killers become insatiable.

For the Kenyon Review blog, Karen Malpede examines the history of extinction and the literature that attempts to document it.