In this case, it's not even extra animal deaths:
> It was important to Dr Hartnell that no kangaroos were killed expressly for his research, and this has remained his practice throughout his investigations: all of the work has been done only using kangaroos that have either been culled for reasons of population control or harvested for meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine too, but probably not for adult kangaroos.
Kangaroo meat is super lean and very tasty. needs to be cooked very carefully or it goes very chewy and dry.
https://www.coles.com.au/search?q=kangaroo
It's pretty gamey, I don't find it unpleasant, but I wouldn't eat it in favour of a good beef steak.
But in some European countries, more bits of the animal are being eaten (beef tongue, e.g.), and more animals are being eaten (e.g. horses). In Switzerland, kangaroo and ostrich became somewhat popular when at the height of the Mad Cow Disease epidemic, people were reluctant to eat beef.
Maybe we can bring back the “lake cows” and their “lake cow bacon”.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-us-almost-bec...
I think I've yet to meet somebody with a Christian Anglo-Saxon background who said they did. People with Hispanic, Jewish, Eastern European, and many continental Western European backgrounds often do. Of course beef tongue is also found in Chinese cuisine.