Hunting and hunters: psychoanalysis

In today's society the rule is: anyone who feels nothing when killing is severely disturbed.

Wild beim Wild editorial team — 11 July 2020

The hobby hunter under psychoanalysis

Hobby hunters justify their hobby like a mantra by claiming that they take pleasure in making a kill while hunting – that the killing of living beings is therefore their goal.

Yet hunting is no longer an existential drive for survival. In this day and age, the drives of hunger and thirst can be satisfied in an ethically correct manner. Moreover, there is meat in abundance, which always makes people ill as well. The hunting drive is an archaic relic from a bygone era, like cannibalism and making fire with stones.

For me, hunting is like picking an apple.
Editor and hunter Karl Lüönd

The killing of wild animals by hobby hunters while hunting for fun and out of passion is something primitive and barbaric, to which a small militant minority of society feels drawn.

If one reduces the deeds of hobby hunters while hunting to mere kill-making, then we live in the midst of a great open-air slaughterhouse. Children, tourists and the public are eyewitnesses to repugnant conditions.

Ethically developed nature lovers actively create beautiful experiences in nature without executing wild animals in order to feel good. There are countless commendable people who also use, tend and care for nature – carrying out sustainable, selfless work in the fire brigade, in civil protection, in animal welfare, building dry stone walls, tending biotopes, completing rural service placements, rescuing roe deer fawns, running wildlife stations, and so on. It would never occur to any of them to demand a sacrifice in the form of a living being for this, as the hobby hunters do.

13001324_611949268955986_2671468077768585891_n — The hobby hunter under psychoanalysis

From a neuroscientific point of view, it is interesting that acts of violence such as being a hunter alter a brain. The balance between intellectual faculties and the baser animal drives is disturbed. Hobby hunters often lack respect for fellow creatures. Their inner demons react irritably to restrictions, advice and criticism from the ordinary population.

At the point where violence is discharged in hunting, damage is caused just as it is at the point at which it is directed. And this in a conceivably concrete way at the neuronal level. Scientists have discovered this in studies of soldiers or serial killers. Neuropsychologists also confirm: the amygdala, a core region in the brain, is conspicuously 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.

Hobby hunters are incapable of doing anything progressive in ethics. They depend on people with conscience and developed character to accomplish anything creative. It is therefore not surprising that in the past it was animal welfare advocates who set in motion the drive for improvements in wildlife protection in hunting. Hunters always reacted reluctantly to initiatives. Common sense led to greater wildlife protection in hunting. For example, through the abolition of leg-hold traps or bird hunting with lime twigs. The fact that the whole ammunition issue came onto the table. Animal welfare advocates were the driving force behind the restriction of hunting seasons and the reduction in the number of huntable species. To prevent the extermination of wild animals, animal welfare advocates imposed on hunters the moral obligation of game management. The ethics of hunters traditionally always lag behind the spirit of the times.

Hobby-Jäger und ihr Muster im Gehirn

Hobby hunters do not hunt out of usefulness. They have nothing to do with ecology, but they are people of emotion: hobby hunters are more strongly driven by aggression, more strongly determined by a general striving for domination. Hobby hunters predominantly belong to the lower strata of society and are rather represented in politics, science, industry and entrepreneurship by atypical personalities.

Hobby hunters are militant and aggressive. Violence at the hand of the hunter is being tolerated less and less, and this is a good thing. Hunting is rightly criticised from all directions. Hobby hunting is a pathological behavioural pattern that, in peacetime, permits indulgence in killing within the animal kingdom.

Hunters are not lovers of wild animals when they hunt

Hobby hunters buy wild animals through hunting ground or licence fees in order to act out their urges on them, much as in prostitution. It is less about love than about an illusion. Wild animals do not like hobby hunters when they are out hunting. The sex toys of hobby hunters are odour-masking deodorants, night vision devices, binoculars, game timers, camera traps, camouflage clothing, scent filters, laser rangefinders, illuminated rifle scopes, special projectiles, knives, weapons, and so on.

Every autumn, the hunting virus rages at its peak. The main motive in this is the greed for trophies.

Hobby hunters do not hunt to establish an ecological balance, nor do they regulate wildlife populations sustainably from an ecological and economic point of view. Since hunting pressure tends to cause wildlife populations to increase, they do not really contribute to reducing wildlife damage either. Hobby hunters are not nature conservationists but archaic exploiters of nature – to the dismay of many. Hobby hunters nourish the cult of death and are embedded in sectarian structures.

Where necessary, wildlife populations can today also be regulated sustainably by means of birth control such as immunocontraception, without waging war in the animal kingdom on the hunt.

Hunting torments countless animals pointlessly. Hunters do not regulate, they merely decimate, and they do so neither properly nor successfully. Year after year, farmers, foresters and winegrowers lament damage to their crops despite hunting. Shot-up wildlife populations produce more offspring than in unhunted areas. Hunters are responsible for the damage, especially for the many wildlife accidents and the unnatural behaviour of wild animals. Hunting is the very epitome of damage. Hunters leave behind countless tonnes of heavy metals from their ammunition while pursuing their hobby. They severely poison our environment and try to foist unhealthy game meat, enriched with fear hormones, on the population. The WHO classifies processed game meat as carcinogenic. 50 g of meat = 18 % higher cancer risk.

Hunters do not only kill sick or old animals, but mostly the strongest and healthiest wild animals. A large number of animals are merely injured and not killed in the course of the hunt.

A cultural landscape also means practising the culture of non-violence towards living beings. Hunting living beings is uncultured, just as sodomy, bullfighting or war are. Culture is: Thou shalt not kill! This was also recognised by Hubertus, the self-proclaimed patron saint of hunters. Hunting is ugly. Hunting is cruelty to animals. Hobby hunting pretends to be something it is not at all.

Violence in schools – what do hobby hunters and hunting have to do with it?

Young people who have once tortured animals commit violent offences three times more often than animal-loving boys and girls. This is the conclusion of a survey of over 3,600 pupils from twenty Swiss cantons. The criminologists Martin Killias of the University of Zurich and Sonia Lucia of the University of Geneva evaluated the Swiss data of an international delinquency study.

As the researchers report in the journal «Psychology of Violence», they compared the information on cruelty to animals with the young people's answers about offences committed. The results were clear: cruelty to animals is linked to all kinds of crimes, in particular to vandalism and serious acts of violence.

Cruelty to animals goes hand in hand with offences involving rage and violence, the researchers write. Perhaps it is an indicator of who will later also become violent towards people. Because the respondents did not have to state when they committed their acts, however, the study cannot prove beyond doubt that cruelty to animals was a precursor of other offences.

Active cruelty to animals refers to the torturing, mistreating or unnecessary killing of animals.
Passive cruelty to animals refers to the neglect or abandonment of animals.

Hobby hunters have no pedagogical vocation. The malformed attitude of the wildlife killers towards nature has nothing to do with biology, ecology, and so on, or with the protection of wild animals – quite the contrary! Hobby hunters kill out of passion. As a result, neutrality cannot be guaranteed. That is why they must be kept away from schools and children.

Cruelty to animals as a symptom of a disorder

Cruelty to animals is described in ICD 10 as a symptom of a conduct disorder (F91). Cruelty to animals can frequently be observed in violent offenders as early as childhood and adolescence. A clear delineation is difficult, since such behaviour is not unusual in children and adolescents. Likewise, there is a connection between violence against animals and interpersonal violence.

Psychoanalysts interpret cruelty to animals as a defence mechanism in the form of «displacement». The animal embodies the role of a whipping boy. Frequently, former victims become perpetrators who, in the act of torment, re-enact upon the object — the animal — the suffering they subjectively experienced in the past, thereby briefly experiencing a release of their pent-up inner aggressive tension.

Hunting and killing are associated with aggression and the striving for dominance. That hunting commends itself as a «good», indeed clean, method of killing is only possible against the background of a complicity of silence. What is kept silent is the experience of killing. A blindness of the soul that is only suspended when the hunter portrays the killing as a frenzy of bloodlust or as a redemption, thereby once again turning it into an unreal event. A psychological state of emergency of which he has become the victim. This is striking in hunters' self-portrayals and their descriptions of the hunt: the hunter transfers responsibility for his deeds onto an autonomous drive operating within him. Set against this conflict-ridden, indeed dramatic, state of soul is the infinite ease of killing. It is cushioned by a pseudo-logic and a sham rationality. This ensures that hunting remains psychologically inconspicuous and part of normality.
Dr. phil. Hanna Rheinz explains.

Psychopathy denotes a severe personality disorder which, in those affected, is accompanied by a far-reaching or complete absence of empathy and conscience. At first glance, psychopaths can be charming; they know how to establish superficial relationships. In doing so they are at times highly manipulative in order to achieve their aims. Psychopaths often lack long-term goals; they are impulsive and irresponsible.

Elevated dopamine and serotonin levels have been observed in psychopaths. This possibly leads to the disinhibition of aggressive impulses. Reduced cortisol levels have also been observed. It is suspected that the dysfunctions and dysregulations are established as early as in early childhood. Around 80% of hunters come from a hunting family. Career changers are rather the exception.

When individuals with psychopathy see other living beings suffer, important brain regions do not become active and thus do not connect with other regions that are important for proper decision-making.

According to neurological tests, psychopaths are very sensitive when it comes to their own well-being. In this case, important brain regions are more active than average. You will hardly find a vegetarian among hobby hunters.

Hunting and hunters: psychoanalysis — Brain scan in psychopaths

But when psychopaths have to imagine pain or suffering in others, the healthy brain activities fail. What is more, it stimulates other activities in the brain (ventral striatum), a region known to feel indifferent pleasure when others experience pain.

Sadism, narcissism and the glorification of violence are easy to cultivate through hunting. That is why hobby hunters should be kept away from schools, children and wild animals, and room should be made for scientific wildlife management.

Whoever obtains a hunting licence always receives two things: a licence to kill and a licence to dull the mind.

More on this in the dossier: The Psychology of Hunting