Sadism: understanding hobby hunters better

There is no doubt that a scientific relation exists between violence against animals and violence against humans.

From an ethical standpoint, society therefore has a duty to act preventively in cases of sadism.

The aggression of hobby hunters against animals is an expression of a behavioural disorder. Violence against animals – violence against humans: this thesis is being underpinned by ever more scientific studies.

Differences between a hobby hunter and a serial killer?

Both have hunting fever and a strong craving for power and control. Hunting can be a first symptom of a dangerous psychopathy that is not confined to animals alone. Many studies prove that acts of violence against animals demand our full attention!

Both the serial killer and the hobby hunter believe they are taking part in something important. Strikingly often, brain anomalies are found in violent offenders. Violence leaves traces in the brain after a short time. Neuropsychologists confirm: the amygdala, a core region in the brain, is noticeably atrophied or impaired in violent offenders. If this central part of the brain is defective, the feeling of disgust, among other things, is switched off.

When killing, both experience something similar to consuming illegal drugs. A temporary relief, a calming, passes through their body and mind – until they must once again set out in search of a victim. It cannot be denied that the hobby hunting menace also involves other illegal activities, such as poaching, arms smuggling, crime, alcohol abuse, and so on, while sociopathy is encouraged.

Hunting weapons lead to abuse in our social life. Again and again there are firearm suicides, threats and fatal tragedies. Year after year, countless people are killed and injured by hobby hunters and their weapons, sometimes so severely that they end up in a wheelchair or have to have limbs amputated.

Animals play an important role in our existence, just as humans do. They also show us how important it is to share, since we humans are not the only living beings on the planet.

Hobby hunting is the dark shadow that torments wild animals. Hobby hunting is like prostitution. Territorial and licence hunters pay a sum of money to be able to indulge their passion, to be allowed to act out their killing urge. The authorities in Switzerland even organise especially attractive hunts to show off.

According to experts, pornography is a decisive factor in stimulating the imagination of serial killers, especially bondage games and sadomasochism, in which victims are dominated and controlled.

Relevant militant hobby hunter magazines are full of images of hobby hunters holding a weapon in their hand and posing in a dominant position over their victims. Such magazines stimulate the imagination of hobby hunters, making them want to hunt more and more, including in all manner of countries. Hobby hunters need such photographs and films to feel important.

Hobby hunters have a great desire to do something heroic, to satisfy their feeling of self-worth through the act of killing. Hobby hunters do not shy away from, with missionary zeal, abusing children in schools. Sectarian, with their hunter's tall tales, they advertise their violent passion. Children and young people have a great love for animals, and there hobby hunters place weapons and atrocities into their hands, which contradicts the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

What also connects hobby hunters and serial killers is the desire to collect trophies from their victims. Both love going stalking, looking out for victims, for the next violent act.

I do not mean to suggest that most hunters are weak people, but in my experience weak people often enough take the opportunity to compensate for their flaw by hunting or playing around with weapons and knives.

Quote from the non-fiction book «The Anatomy of Motive» by FBI profiler John Douglas.

Hobby hunters have been subjected, both in Europe and in the USA, to psychological and sociological subjected to investigations and compared with non-hunters in respect of various aspects. The results clearly show that hobby hunters do not display a greater affinity with nature than non-hunters, tend to take a rather negative view of animal, environmental and nature protection issues, and generally display a higher tendency towards aggressive behaviour – a typical characteristic of meat-eaters. The hunter's love of animals and nature does not delight in the existence of the beloved object; rather, it aims to possess the beloved creature entirely, hide and hair, and culminates in turning it into prey through the act of killing. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the hunting tales – in practically every issue of the popular hunting magazines.

Even if people who hunt have differing character traits, ultimately the hobby hunters are all united by the same conduct: a violent treatment of peace-loving animals and of nature, often merely as fun, a leisure pursuit or even as a sport, as well as the poisoning of nature with lead-containing ammunition. In the context of hobby hunting, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts speak of psychological defects in hobby hunters. Hobby hunters want to kill!

«With the hunting licence one acquires the licence to kill. The fact that, in common parlance, someone who holds a hunting licence is regarded as not entirely of sound mind probably has – like most popular sayings – a kernel of truth. And indeed, we know neither how many psychopaths, gun fanatics or addicts there are among hunting licence holders, who are quite legally permitted to handle firearms, nor do we know who among the hunting licence candidates wants to take the hunting examination solely in order to gain legal access to firearms. We do not know it, the authorities do not know it, the hunting associations do not know it – and would rather not know it either,» as K.H. explains.

Christian Lüdke is a psychotherapist, trains special police units and is concerned above all with the psychology of perpetrators.

Lüdke: «Such people lead a double life. Inside they feel like absolute failures – in family, work and sexual terms – and are driven by extreme desires for power. Because they cannot act this out in everyday life, they have to do so through such an act of violence and seek out the weakest victims.»

How can one recognise such a person?

Lüdke: «Outwardly, they usually appear very inconspicuous. But in the life histories of these perpetrators, three symptoms are frequently found around the age of eleven: that they start wetting the bed again, that they play with fire and, above all, that they torment animals.»

Are these isolated cases?

Lüdke: «Sadly, no. There are very many people among us who possess such a high level of sexual, criminal energy that they are virtually ticking time bombs.»

Hobby hunter Frank Gust

Frank Gust is a German serial killer sentenced to life imprisonment followed by preventive detention. As we learn from an interview conducted by criminologist Petra Klages, in his case the tormenting and killing of animals stood at the beginning of his development. It should be noted that Frank Gust was, of all people, trained as a hobby hunter by his mother, a former hobby hunter herself, and in this way also legally came into possession of firearms. And just as he had learned from his mother how to gut animal carcasses, he later proceeded in the same way with his killing of people. In hindsight, the mother regretted this hunting training and speaks of a mistake she made:

«…they should have arrested me, because I failed so badly. I used to be a hunter and trained Frank as a hunter too. That includes gutting the game. And since he dismembered the bodies, let's say, in a professional manner, I thought: well, I did teach him how.»

In the interview with Petra Klages, the hunting-licence holder Frank Gust reported on his private experiences with the hunting craft and openly criticised the claim that hobby hunters were always also nature conservationists:

Some certainly are. But the greatest part of the people I got to know there were a mixture of class snobbery and hypocrisy.

Frank Gust

When asked whether the goal was not to protect nature and animals, Gust continued that, in his experience, it was rather about «building, under the cloak of oh-so-noble hunting, a wonderful camouflage for other cravings».

When the interviewer asked whether he had any examples of this, Frank Gust described two incidents that cannot be mentioned here in full length. To convey an impression, however, the episode recalled by Gust during a rabbit hunt is briefly mentioned:

There was a supposedly experienced and highly respected hunter. He shot at a rabbit … he could have taken a sure shot from a few metres away, but he waits until it has run a little further, so that he no longer hits it so perfectly with the shot pattern, because then it twitches for longer. It was not about getting a good roast or protecting the population, it was simply about making it hurt nicely. Only of course one says nothing officially about that.

Frank Gust

The clinical picture of sadism in the hobby hunter

If we could look into the subconscious in the melting pot of hobby hunting, we would find a Pandora's box of suppressed problems.

The renowned psychiatrist Dr Karl Menninger (1893-1990), who in 1981 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter and who is the namesake of the Menninger School of Psychiatry, wrote extensively about the erotic sadistic motivation theory in hobby hunting. «Sadism can take a socially acceptable form (such as deer hunting and deer watching) and other sorts of so-called hunting practices», he writes. «These all represent the destructive and cruel energies of men, directed at helpless creatures.»

The symptoms of hobby hunters only permit pleasure-oriented experience and emotional stability to a certain degree. To bring about the desired stimulation, the fantasies are expanded, for example through trophy hunting abroad. At times they get so out of hand that hobby hunters even kill people. Again and again the media report on homicides or other criminal activities of the problem group «hobby hunters», as most recently, among others, the attack (carried out by a hobby hunter) outside the UBS branch in Zurich in February 2018.

Animal welfare always means human protection at the same time. Anyone who does not understand this ensures, with their lack of understanding, that we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Volker Mariak

German studies and academic papers on the topic «Violence against people – violence against animals»:

More on this in the dossier: The Psychology of Hunting