To create a stable population human intervention is absolutely required and I don’t disagree with anything you said. However, I’d clarify that large die offs don’t cause extinction (in a vacuum) and are a rather natural response to environmental instability. Animal populations naturally fluctuate over time as food sources become abundant and then the abundance of animals leads to an abundance of natural predators which then over hunts the animals leading to die-offs. These effects naturally ripple through food chains - often being triggered by particularly abundant plant growth (due to a light winter or heavy rains etc…) or due to a deficiency (a drought or storm).

Humans are fucking crazy so when we overhunt there’s no natural correction, so we’ll sometimes aggressively cull predators (as in this case) and then need to step into that role ourselves until natural predators can restablize. In the past two centuries it’s been our habit to actively extinct predators (I.e. dingos, Catamounts, wolves) to protect domestic livestock and that’s a fucking hard problem to undo… sometimes we can track down a breeding pair and aggressively repopulate, other times we need to import a similar predator.

Nature can correct a lot of damage… but humans can do a shit ton of damage.