Should the government invest in the preservation of endangered species?

[Хahar 🤔]

Because there is absolutley no reason why we need to protect these animals, people should be free to hunt what they want.  If people want to protect them they can petition the government to get some kind of power to stop it.  I don't want my taxpayers dollars going into discouraging hunting

Go ask a biologist how useless animals are.  You will get enlightened on how ridiculously complicated ecosystems can be and how the sizable reduction (not even the extinction) of even one single species can have drastic, far-reaching consequences (by way of removing the natural predator of another species, for example) that have tons of ramifications that directly affect humans.

What happens if overfishing was allowed to continue indefinitely until there were no fish left in the sea?  Then what?  Do you have any idea how vitally important they are to the global ecosystem, not even mentioning how important they are to many economies?  Just as no man is an island, neither is any animal an island, either - everything that is done to any species on the planet has consequences affecting all of the others.  It's not doing it solely for the animals' sake; it's doing it because not doing it will negatively affect humans, too.

I still fail to see why a private organization sanctioned by the government could not do the same thing, we outsource everything else

What would a private organization do that would be different from what the government would do?

Funded by private donations rather than tax dollars

The government can prosecute people, and will never run out of funding. Thhe good arguments have already been made.