Hobby Hunters and Their Brain Patterns

In the emotional cortex, where emotional regulation takes place, certain areas are strikingly inactive in these individuals.

Where violence is unleashed, damage is caused just as much at the source as at the target — and quite concretely so at the neuronal level. Scientists have discovered this through research. Neuropsychologists also 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.

Brain regions responsible for empathy, moral judgment, and fear are less well supplied with blood. Hobby hunters experience no emotional stress and are unable to comprehend the feelings of others; this is why some can kill and murder without batting an eyelid.

In such individuals, there are dark areas in the orbital cortex and around the amygdala — significantly darker compared to an average brain. These are areas responsible for self-control and behavioral regulation. A person with this brain biology is likely to be highly impulsive and should under no circumstances be in possession of a firearm.

These individuals are barely capable of empathy; moreover, important areas of the brain responsible for language are underdeveloped. Hobby hunters speak fluent nonsense. Hobby hunters rejoice when they have been permitted to kill a living being — or «harvest» it.

In order to prevent hobby hunters from being overcome by emotion at the sight of animal suffering, the primitive hunters' yarn or the idiot's German that has developed.

The aim of this hunters' jargon is to express a profound distance between animal and human, in order to trivialise the act of killing in hunting.

For example, a female roe deer is “addressed” (assessed with regard to age, sex and health), and the bullet is “tendered” to her. A sprig (last bite) is placed in the “muzzle” of the killed game, which is then “broached” (gutted). Foxes have no young, but a “brood”. Blood is “sweat”, a shot animal is “blood-marked” and “sick-shot”. A belly shot of a roe deer with hanging entrails is a “wound-sick piece of game”. The skin of wild animals is called a “cover”. Hobby hunters do not kill animals, but “bag” a “piece” of game. Ravens, cats, etc. are “vermin”, and so on and so forth in hunters' Latin.

It will be clear to any person that behind this hunters' jargon lies a denigration and mockery of living beings. Sentient creatures capable of feeling pain are thus robbed not only of their lives but also of their last shred of dignity. Hunters' jargon is irrelevant both in everyday use and in a scientific context. It is a disfigurement of the German language.

Humans have hunted wild animals for thousands of years, primarily during periods of climatic hardship. Over time, however, the justification for hunting has changed considerably. Hunting activities once served as a means of obtaining food, clothing, economic necessity, pleasure and as ritual.

Today's killing of animals by the modern hobby hunter, by contrast, results primarily from greed, acquisitiveness, stupidity, pleasure, indifference, resentment, envy, self-importance, ostentation, boastfulness, jealousy, tradition, arrogance, ignorance, cupidity, presumption, egoism, ill will and a general contempt for living beings.

Today, hunting serves the hobby hunter as a means of releasing aggression and similarly slowing down in nature. Anyone who obtains a hunting licence always receives two things: a licence to kill and a licence to become a fool.

According to prominent scientists, researchers, wildlife biologists, and documented case studies, it is entirely possible and ethically responsible, in today's modern environment largely shaped and controlled by humans, to leave wildlife populations to regulate themselves. The Canton of Geneva has practiced this modern wildlife management for over 40 years. What hundreds of hobby hunters once did poorly there is today handled by a dozen professional game wardens who intervene on a regulatory basis when necessary, rather than massacring foxes, badgers, birds, and other animals — or inflicting suffering — based on arbitrary hunting seasons and the pleasure of killing.

Research in psychology and criminology shows that people who commit acts of violence against animals rarely stop there; many of them go on to do the same to their fellow human beings. Such case studies are abundant today. Hunters are killers!“Hunting is a passion, even an addiction, that delights us, that controls us, and that torments us”writes the hunter Luzius Theler.

The monopoly on the use of force belongs in the hands of the state, exercised by professional game wardens, and must not be delegated to bands of hunters.

More on this in the dossier:Psychology of Hunting

1. Solothurn government defends animal cruelty
2. Amygdala and violence
3. Understanding the link between animal cruelty and family violence: The bioecological systems model
4. Childhood without conscience
5. Why some people become murderously evil
6. Violence as a source of pleasure or displeasure is associated with specific functional connectivity with the nucleus accumbens
7. People who abuse animals rarely stop there
8. Hunting fever
9. Serial Killers Have Under-Developed Brains, Says New Study
10. When children abuse animals – how parents should respond
11. Why Men Trophy Hunt: Showing Off and the Psychology of Shame
12. “Killing can be fun”
13. Hunting and Illegal Violence Against Humans
14. Understanding hunters better
15. Interview: Petra Klages with serial killer Frank Gust
16. Psychological and sociological differences between hobby hunters and non-hunters
17. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
18. Has he lost the plot?
19. The passion of the hunter
20. Hunting and Illegal Violence Against Humans and Other Animals: Exploring the Relationship
21. Hunters and molesters
22. Ohio data confirms hunting/child abuse
23. Michigan stats confirm hunting,  child abuse
24. Preventing domestic violence through weapons
25. Cazadores deportivos – Mentes criminales?
26. Hunting and hunters: Psychoanalysis
27. A researcher finds a specific pattern in the brains of serial killers
28. The brain
29. Hobby hunters and their pattern in the brain
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