Do Hobby Hunters Find Killing Exciting?

The greater the gap between the behavior and the associated information, the stronger the cognitive dissonance, the more uncomfortable the feelings that arise, which in turn provoke strong negative emotions and usually fierce, inappropriately angry reactions.

So when someone defends themselves unusually vigorously against criticism, the criticism of the discrepancy between wishful thinking and reality was largely justified. The popular saying goes: “A hit dog will bark” or diagnoses it succinctly:

„The truth of a remark can be recognized by the intensity of the reactions it provokes.»

Instead of hobby hunters addressing the major, widespread problems, other grievances are thrown into the mix, stirred up and pushed forward — and a solution is then found for neither one nor the other problem. For of course, factory farming cannot be improved or abolished by having everyone go into the forest and shoot at wildlife from now on. This comparison is the typical hobby hunter bingo, used to dodge responsibility, avoid leaving one’s own comfort zone, and avoid questioning one’s own shabby behavior –and that is precisely the point!

Without input there is no output

The more citizens learn about the reprehensibility, animal cruelty and unsustainability of hobby hunting, the more aware they become of the absurdity of conventional anthropocentric ethics, the more they inform themselves about the suffering of wild animals and their exploitation, the less their mechanisms of repression will function.

From this point on, they find themselves in excellent company with many other remarkable people who have walked the same path: Nobel laureates, writers, artists, philosophers of the first rank, and so on. The driving force behind their evolutionary quantum leap is, alongside their sense of «compassion«, above all the love of animals and their protection from destructive impulses.

Hobby hunting cannot be justified by claiming a desire to circumvent factory farming. By that logic, one could compare a joint to a tin of tobacco and use it to justify smoking.

The foundation of our open society is to engage with criticism from scientific experts, to discuss matters objectively, and thereby contribute to the constructive improvement of grievances.

The dull promotional video from the hobby hunter milieu shown above is clearly concerned only with obfuscation, media whitewashing, denial, self-affirmation, lobbying, and the promotion of absurd ideologies. It has nothing to do with a "depoliticisation of the debate" and is so transparent that the film and its accompanying statements can only be described as «embarrassing». When one then examines the numerous comments posted online by the hunting community, coupled with venomous and unfounded insinuations directed at critics, the picture is once again complete.

If there is a passion that creates truly pitiful suffering, it is hobby hunting

Hundreds of thousands of these «passionate enthusiasts» wage a merciless war against every conceivable animal across the entire planet, attaching price tags to them, cataloguing them, and releasing them for slaughter at a profit. To distract from these barbaric conditions, idyllic narratives are repeatedly invoked: that one only very rarely kills an animal and is primarily a Bambi-protecting, saviour-hunter who occasionally consumes a fellow creature.

On closer inspection, however, it appears that hobby hunters are the ones engaged in trap hunting, enclosure hunting, trophy hunting, recreational killing, fox hunting, releasing or keeping animals captive, stressing, wounding, harassing, and abusing them in every conceivable manner — to say nothing of alcohol and weapons misuse. The entire catalogue of sadistic and appalling abuses appears not to exist at all within the meagre consciousness of hobby hunters.

A mere glance at hunting statistics, hunting catalogues, well-known hunting forums, letters to the editor, newspapers, and war zones is enough to make one feel as though the world of hobby hunters is the purest animal hell imaginable. This places the hunting community in a dilemma and a state of cognitive dissonance — their tear-jerking romantic descriptions bear no resemblance whatsoever to reality.

That is why they resort to the usual diversionary tactics on all critical platforms: aggression, mockery, cynicism, allegations of incompetence, polemics, denial, outrage, sham battles, repression, trivialization, whitewashing, and whataboutism dominate the arguments of hobby hunters in every discussion. The goal is simply to prevent the barbaric excesses of recreational hunting from becoming the focus of public attention!

Add to this the embarrassing propaganda videos produced by wildlife killers. Do the protagonists in this Courths-Mahler production not feel uncomfortable in some way themselves? The scenes are somehow reminiscent of faded Marlboro advertisements. There too, the hero sits wide-legged in the saloon and recounts how he has conquered nature. And yet it is entirely pointless to keep rehashing how one bravely out there “redeems” Bambi, shoots the world into shape with lead and buckshot, or blasts one’s lunch out of a tree with a high-tech weapon — instead of finally reforming the hunting legislation inherited from the old sadistic mass killers.

Ecological hunters and specialist advisors from animal protection organizations have long had good proposals and solutions on the table — but without any of the aforementioned special atrocities. That would quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. And such transparent image videos would likewise become obsolete.

When hobby hunters talk about their activities, it tends to be laden with platitudes, which provides ample room for attack by people well-versed in cutting through empty rhetoric. Those with a background in biology and research rarely have much difficulty refuting all hunter arguments.