Their native habitats are about as totally different as you can get without being underwater. Why do you assume their behaviors will be similar?
By that logic, bonobos could almost certainly be used to raised cloned humans. I would actually like to see the results of this experiment, particularly manner in which the person would resolve conflicts :)
> Maybe it will work for some species, and it won't for others, but there have been much largest amounts of money wasted on much less noble projects.
This is more philosophy, but this doesn't seem noble at all. Unless the animal being resurrected plays a crucial, irreplaceable role in the global ecosystem, these actions strike me as a hubris borne out of a collective/species-wide guilt for exterminating the animal in the first place.
Yes, our actions caused a species to go extinct. We should accept and make peace with that. It is cruel to bring a species back from extinction to be captive, like bringing something back from the dead so it can truly serve a sentence of life in prison.
Also, if we aren't doing anything to preserve its natural habitat, and all elements point to a more, not less, anthropocenic world, then it will just go extinct again in the wild.
(captive) elephants could almost certainly be used to raise cloned wolly mammoths; there are a variety of Rhino species which could be used to help raise un-extinct Rhinos.
I don't see why it's not worth trying. Maybe it will work for some species, and it won't for others, but there have been much largest amounts of money wasted on much less noble projects.