Sadism: Better Understanding Hobby Hunters

There is undoubtedly a scientific relationship between violence against animals and violence against humans.

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

The aggression of hobby hunters towards animals is an expression of a behavioral disorder. Violence against animals — violence against humans: this thesis is increasingly supported by scientific studies.

Differences between hobby hunters and serial killers?

Both experience a thrill of the hunt and a strong desire for power and control. Hunting can be a first symptom of a dangerous psychopathy that is not limited to animals alone. Numerous studies confirm that acts of violence against animals demand our full attention.

Both the serial killer and the hobby hunter believe they are participating in something important. Notably, brain anomalies are frequently identified in perpetrators of violence. Violence leaves traces in the brain after a short period of time. Neuropsychologists confirm: the amygdala, a core region of the brain, is markedly underdeveloped or impaired in violent offenders. When this central part of the brain is defective, the sense of disgust, among other things, is switched off.

When killing, both experience something similar to the consumption of illegal drugs. A temporary sense of relief and calm passes through their body and mind — until the search for a new victim must begin again. It cannot be dismissed that within the realm of hobby hunting, other illegal activities, such as poaching, arms smuggling, criminal behaviour, alcohol abuse, and so on, are also practised, and that sociopathy is thereby encouraged.

Hunting weapons lead to abuse in our social life. Time and again, firearm suicides, threats, and deadly tragedies occur. Year after year, countless people are killed and injured by hobby hunters and their weapons, in some cases so severely that they end up in wheelchairs or 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 this planet.

Recreational hunting is the dark shadow that wildlife torments. Recreational hunting is like prostitution. Territory hunters and licence hunters pay a sum of money to indulge their passion and act out their drive to kill. The authorities in Switzerland even organise specially attractive hunts in order to boast about them.

According to experts, pornography is a decisive factor in stimulating the fantasies of serial killers, particularly bondage and sadomasochism, in which victims can be dominated and controlled.

Notorious militant hobby hunter magazines are filled with images of hobby hunters holding a weapon and posing in a dominant position over their victims. Such magazines stimulate the fantasy of hobby hunters to want to hunt more and more, in every corner of the world. Hobby hunters need such photographs and films in order to feel important.

Hobby hunters have a strong desire to do something heroic, to satisfy their sense of self-worth through the act of killing. Hobby hunters do not hesitate to abuse children at schools with missionary zeal. In a sectarian manner, using their hunters’ jargon, they advertise their violent passion. Children and young people have a great love of animals, and yet hobby hunters place weapons and misdeeds in their hands — something that contradicts the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

What hobby hunters and serial killers also have in common is the desire to collect trophies from their victims. Both love to go stalking, searching for victims, for the next violent act.

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

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

Hobby hunters have been subjected, both in Europe and in the USA, to psychological and sociological studies and compared with non-hunters across various aspects. The results clearly show that hobby hunters display no greater connection to nature than non-hunters, tend to hold negative views on animal welfare, environmental protection, and conservation issues, and generally exhibit a higher tendency toward aggressive behavior — a typical characteristic among meat-eaters. The hunter’s love of animals and nature does not find joy in the existence of the beloved object; rather, it aims to possess the beloved creature wholly, culminating in making it prey through the act of killing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in hunting narratives — found in virtually every issue of the common hunting magazines.

Even though people who hunt may possess different character traits, all hobby hunters are ultimately united by the same conduct: a violent treatment of peace-loving animals and nature, often pursued merely for fun, leisure, or sport, as well as the poisoning of nature with lead-based ammunition. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts speak, in the context of recreational hunting, of psychological defects among hobby hunters. Hobby hunters want to kill!

«A hunting license is a license to kill. The fact that, in common parlance, someone who holds a hunting license is considered not entirely of sound mind likely has — as most folk wisdom does — a kernel of truth. And indeed, we know neither how many psychopaths, gun fanatics, or addicts are among hunting license holders who are fully entitled to handle firearms legally, nor do we know who among hunting license applicants wishes solely to pass the hunter’s exam in order to obtain legal access to firearms. We do not know, the authorities do not know, the hunting associations do not know — and would rather not know either», as K.H. explains.

Christian Lüdke is a psychotherapist, trains specialist police units, and focuses primarily on the psychology of perpetrators.

Lüdke:"Such people lead a double life. Inside, they feel like absolute failures — in family, professional, and sexual terms — and are driven by extreme desires for power. Because they cannot act on this in everyday life, they have to do it through acts of violence and seek out the weakest victims."

How can one recognize such a person?

Lüdke: "Outwardly, they are mostly very inconspicuous. But in the life histories of these perpetrators, three symptoms frequently appear 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: "Unfortunately not. There are a great many people among us who have such a high level of sexual, criminal energy that they are, so to speak, ticking time bombs.»

Hobby hunter Frank Gust

Frank Gust is a German serial killer sentenced to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention. As we learn from an interview conducted by criminologist Petra Klages, animal cruelty and the killing of animals were at the beginning of his trajectory. It should be noted that Frank Gust was trained as a hobby hunter by his own mother — herself a former hobby hunter — and thus also obtained firearms legally. And just as he had learned from his mother how to gut animal carcasses, he later proceeded in the same manner when killing his human victims. In hindsight, his 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 I also trained Frank to be a hunter. That includes field dressing the game. And since he dismembered the bodies, shall we say, in a professional manner, I thought: I taught him how to do it.»

In his interview with Petra Klages, hunting licence holder Frank Gust spoke about his personal experiences with the craft of hunting and openly criticized the claim that hobby hunters are always also conservationists:

Some certainly are. But the majority of the people I got to know there was a mixture of class snobbery and hypocrisy.

Frank Gust

When asked whether the goal was not to protect nature and animals, Gust continued, saying that in his experience it was more about "building a wonderful cover for other desires under the guise of the oh-so-noble art of hunting".

When the interviewer asked whether he had any examples of this, Frank Gust described two incidents that cannot be recounted here in full. However, to give an impression, the episode recalled by Gust from a rabbit hunt is briefly mentioned:

There was an allegedly experienced and highly respected hunter. He shot at a rabbit … could have used a clean shot from a few metres away, but waited until it had run a little further, precisely in order not to hit it so perfectly with the shot pattern, because then it would twitch for longer. It was not about getting a good roast or protecting the stock — it was simply about making it hurt nicely. Of course, officially no one says anything about that.

Frank Gust

The pathology of sadism among hobby hunters

If we could look into the subconscious of the collective pool of recreational hunters, we would find a Pandora's box of suppressed problems.

The renowned psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger (1893–1990), who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter in 1981 and after whom the Menninger School of Psychiatry is named, wrote extensively about the erotic sadistic motivational theory in recreational hunting. “Sadism can take a socially acceptable form (such as deer hunting and deer watching) and other varieties of so-called hunting practices,” he writes. “They all represent the destructive and cruel energies of men directed at helpless creatures.”

The symptoms of hobby hunters allow for pleasurable experience and emotional stability only to a certain degree. In order to bring about the desired stimulation, the fantasies are expanded, for example through trophy hunts abroad. At times they spiral so far out of control that hobby hunters even kill people. Time and again, media report on homicides or other criminal activities by the problem group “hobby hunters,” most recently including the attack (carried out by a hobby hunter) outside the UBS branch in Zurich in February 2018.

Animal protection always means human protection at the same time. Those who fail to understand this ensure, through their lack of understanding, that we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Volker Mariak

German studies and specialist publications on the topic of “violence against people — violence against animals”:

More on this in the dossier: Psychology of Hunting