Should we bring back the passenger pigeon?

Deextinction is starting to head from "can we" to "should we." (Experiments in cloning an ancient horse are seen as preliminary to recreating mammoths).

A team is using rock pigeons and CRISPR in a plan to edit in passenger pigeon genes to restore the species...or something like it.

The eventual plan will be to use a much more closely-related species, with the ultimate goal of reintroducing the engineered "passenger pigeons" (Which the creator acknowledges will be a band-tailed pigeon/passenger pigeon hybrid).

So.

Should we?

Humans are in no small part to blame for the loss of the species, so one might argue we're expiating the sin. However, there's one issue with this (which rears an even uglier head in mammoth cloning).

Not all of a species is in its genes.

I've long held that while I consider cloning a mammoth as an attraction to be relatively harmless, we won't actually get a mammoth.

We'll get a fuzzy elephant. Because our cloned mammoth will be birthed and raised by a female elephant. He'll grow up within elephant culture, he'll learn how to be an elephant. Mammoth culture may have been different.

Ah, but elephants are much smarter than pigeons.

Perhaps, but pigeons have culture too. We can't bring back the passenger pigeon culture, and if we reintroduce large numbers of these birds...then what culture will they have? Presumably that of band-tailed pigeons. Will the genes shift them enough?

Or will they take off in some unanticipated direction. Maybe they'll be something good, maybe not. But we should think about deextinction carefully, because we could end up introducing yet another invasive species to an already stressed environment.