I was bugged by the whole concept, because i really do not like hunting at all and also never likes that "supremacist/chauvinistic" view on other lifeforms and/or civilisations that sometimes pops up in the SG-series so i did not watch it i just skipped through it so it would not miss anything plot-essential.
It was actually bad last week too when they decided that they could do as they please with that other people/civilisation just because they were not as advanced as "we" are. Mckay had some genuine asshole lines there when he talked to those other scientists. It was the same concept as this weeks, "we can kill everything that we do not think is intelligent".....wtf? We have seen it many times before, when they just barge in with high-tech weapons and take over in some medieval place even though they claimed in the earlier seasons that they should NOT do that to foreign cultures as far as i remember.
Maybe among explorers in medieval times, that would be an understandable attitude but hardly these times. Some really horrible crimes against nature has been committed with that attitude in the past. Intelligence is hardy a deciding factor in questions like these, because most organisms has a role to fill in an ecosystem, no matter how intelligent they are, actually the bottom of foodchains usually consists of organism that just "exists" but they are still extremely important.
Those creatures could be the last of their kind as far as the SG-team knew. A ship full of scientists and explorer would/should not act like that at all. Also, who decides what intelligence is? And, by what logic is it ok to kill things in general just because they are not deemed intelligent? Also, where do you draw the line then? How intelligent must you be to be allowed to live? Maybe they should kill anybody with an IQ lesser than Mckay, Rush and Eli?
I demand a much higher moral/ethic/scientific standard from sci-fi than that.