Hunting at Poolesville High School is a fairly common activity to encounter.  Hunting animals like deer and ducks is a sport that many take pride in through having their game mounted, eating it, or selling it for a profit.  As long as hunting is practiced in a legal manner on animals who are not in the endangered category, it is a sport that does not cause much harm.  Practicing hunting on animals such as elephants, rhinos, and other animals who are being killed for trophy and are beginning to become endangered is a harmful activity.  The hunting of animals like deer, who are vastly overpopulated in Maryland, is not going to cause a great deal of harm because the surplus of deer is causing harm as well.  Some students at Poolesville High School were brought onto a property to hunt deer because there were far too many and they were harming the crops being grown.  This type of hunting that is allowed and encouraged in this specific situation with the proper paperwork and licensing is acceptable and sometimes necessary.  However, the hunting of endangered or wild species in places like Africa where animals are less commonly hunted seems less ethical.

Aside from the ethical perspective, many of these animals being hunted for trophy are not overpopulating their environment, and the killings are causing large problems since the animals have huge impacts on their habitat, such as African elephants.  The hunting ritual should be considered acceptable or unacceptable based off of the impact the hunt is having on nature.  Hunting for food, hunting overpopulated animals, or hunting animals that would not cause a crisis in the habitat are acceptable reasons for the hunt.  However, the hunting of animals who are endangered or affect the habitat, animals that are illegal to hunt, or the cruel hunting of animals is an unethical reason for hunting.  The rhino hunt that is going viral on the internet is so momentous because it shows a cruel way of hunting these rhinos.  The hunters are removing their tusks in an aggressive manner and leaving them to bleed out in the wild.  This and other examples of hunting are not ethical because they cause the animal unnecessary amounts of pain.  Animals should not be subject to this torture or any hunting at all if they are endangered and the killing of the animal will threaten the wellbeing of the habitat.