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Well, according to the fluff, there are literally "untold billions" of humans. If even just 0.1% of those have a chronic illness, and 1 of these Xenos can make enough "elixir" for a week of treatment, you could see millions of them being poached every week.

But yeah, I assume it was probably a low priority for the Imperium to police their planet/home system, because, you know, endless war. So probably pretty easy to grab em up by the boatload.

It’s pretty easy to hunt and use species to extinction. Especially in a setting the scale of 40k. It’s sounds a rich mans crack and pretty addictive. Humans would gobble that stuff up.

As for primitive people being worse at managing resources than we are today, that’s patently wrong. Look around.

it's worth noting numerous species have been hunted to extinction, the horse of north america for example.

Well assuming that it’s a Xenos world I doubt that there would be much of an imperial presence on the ground to lower and foul Xenos taint. So prob no arbiters. I could see so form of fleet presence to act as a quarantine against other coming to the planet, but as others have said complacency over time, greed, or a willingness to allow a degenerate Xenos breed be poached to death despite their protected status could have allowed humans to get in and kill em all.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:

Tiennos wrote:
To me that sounds like gratuitous genocide just to make the story more grimdark for the sake of grimdark, but whatever. To each his own.

I think the genocide is analogous to previous and current human driven extinctions like with megafauna, the dodo, and the current hunting of tigers for "medical" benefits.

Humans don't change.

Yeah, I hate grimdumb, but this is perfectly normal human behaviour. Just look up the utter superstitious idiocy that is far eastern Asian "traditional" ""medicine"", it's killing hundreds of species right now, like pangolins, tigers, or rhinos. Grimdark for the sake of grimdark, you say?

Or that miraculous Roman medicine plant, guess what happened to it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

 Tiennos wrote:
As an opposite example: look a the horseshoe crab. Those critters' weird blood is very valuable for medical applications. There are conservation efforts to keep the species from disappearing rather than just bleed every single one dry...

And guess what - they mostly consist of scams. Recent studies strongly suggest that "harmless" amount of blood people draw from the crab actually kills them, just a few days later so it can be blamed on "natural" causes. They also suggest that the study that determined said "harmless" amount was paid by the medicine companies that totally had no vested interest in making their operation appear OK, even if they knew it's completely unsustainable, they just cared for appearances sake. And that's the companies that actually pretend to release the crabs instead of just dumping them into a grinder:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-labs-may-be-killing-horseshoe-crabs/

BTW having just started reading this novel there's an important detail the original poster missed. that this alien protectorate existed and was wiped about 10,000 years before the "current time"

BrianDavion wrote:
BTW having just started reading this novel there's an important detail the original poster missed. that this alien protectorate existed and was wiped about 10,000 years before the "current time"

Yeah, that's a good point It's in the aftermath of the Siege of Terra.

Okay, I guess this accidental genocide is maybe not as unlikely as I thought.

Incidentally, that makes the status of "protectorate" in the Imperium pretty questionable, if that's the kind of protection xenos get...

 Tiennos wrote:
Okay, I guess this accidental genocide is maybe not as unlikely as I thought.

Incidentally, that makes the status of "protectorate" in the Imperium pretty questionable, if that's the kind of protection xenos get...

I imagine a protectorate means the IoM won't eradicate them out of hand but won't hesitate to destroy it. basicly it's the differance between a coyote and a cow. the farmer'll kill both, but he might milk the cow for a bit first

I think "protectorate" is a euphemism for "ghetto."