Would the extinction of Tigers change anything with the way people treat the environment/wild animals?

I was talking with my girlfriend and we randomly got on the subject of Tigers. She pointed out to me that at this point its pretty much a given Tigers will go extinct in the wild in our lifetime. Furthermore, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll go extinct everywhere in our lifetime. The jist of it being their gene pool has been so widdled down that even our captive population would not be enough to sustain a population. My girlfriend is a zoo keeper and does this for a living too, so she’s not just talking out the side of her face.

There are six living subspecies of Tigers today. Combined there are less than 6000 Tigers on the planet. The South China subspecies has only 59 individuals, all in captivity. In addition 3 subspecies of Tigers are already extinct today, all as a result of hunting.

I guess the basic question is, would it change peoples outlook on how they treat the environment, or wild animals, if a major species of animal went extinct? Tigers for example are a huge part of many cultures and are very historically important. If a “popular” animal like the Tiger or say… the Elephant went extinct…. do you think it would have any effect on conservation efforts or feelings towards conservation?

The only example I can think of is the Bald Eagle. In the early 1950’s the national bird of the United States had dropped to a few thousand and were on the brink of extinction. It shamed us so much that we put in legislation to protect and rebuild their population, and it was a major driving force behind banning DDT as a fertilizer/crop protector (DDT effected some calcium process in the birds, effectively sterilizing them or forcing them to lay weak eggs that couldn’t survive).