Got a source? Webster's and Dictionary.com both list a single sense, and it's to do with peoples and cultures, not any living thing. I'm sure it's been used tha

Got a source? Webster's and Dictionary.com both list a single sense, and it's to do with peoples and cultures, not any living thing. I'm sure it's been used that way on occasion, but I'm quite confident that's not a common usage, and employing it for a general audience would tend not to be the best choice. (as another poster noted, the extermination was part of a genocide, that's true, but it remains weird to describe extermination of animals as "genocide" in this kind of context, where we're evidently concerned that the reader might not be aware of why the bison were few in number—it's strange to imply we committed genocide against bison. That is definitely not a normal way to phrase that.)