I come from a long line of poachers. Once ancestor in Bohemia (now known as the Czech Republic) killed a deer on a reserve to feed his family sometime around 1840. He was found out and fled to Hungary, and from Hungary came to the United States.
Later someone in this same branch of the family got busted for poaching fish out of season on Lake Michigan during the depression. He resisted arrest and put a hole in the bottom of the sheriff's boat. They nearly all drown.
Then during the depression my Grandfather shot and salted down two barrels of elk. He got busted when the neighbor lady turned him in. She found out because he gave her 1/2 a salted elk to feed her and her children. They were starving.
I get hunting for food. Some people have no other options. I just don't get the trophy hunting thing, where the head/pictures are taken and the meat is left to rot.
As for those that kill endangered animals, they are simply vile.
Lions are suffering a fate similar to that of Tigers. It is estimated that we have lost 80 - 90% of Africa's lion population since 1975. THere are now more Lions in captivity than in the wild. But trophy hunters still wna their trophies. So the canned hunting industry is booming.
So what is canned hunting? This is where captive lions are bred and raised to trophy size and then shot in a cage, or otherwise restrained, by a "hunter" that pays up to $50,000 to do so. Truly vile.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/03/canned-hunting-lions-bred-slaughterSome might argue that if not for canned hunting then lions would be doomed as they would have no economic value. But such lions are bred indiscriminately, brother to sister, and genetic abnormalities abound. Cubs are also taken away from their mothers right away to force them back into estrus and keep them constantly breeding.
As for the cubs, they are hand reared by volunteers that often do know what fate awaits them. They are loved and raised to trust humans so that their eventual "hunters" will never face any real danger.