Killing the Feminine: Understanding Hobby Hunters
Violence always leads to counter-violence according to the law of cause and effect.
The view that « legal » violence such as hunting seamlessly transitions into illegal violence against people as well is not new.
Whether hobby hunters shoot animals to prove their sexual potency, or whether they do so out of sexual frustration instead of directly raping or killing women: it seems evident that for men who frequently go hunting, it is a social ritual through which they symbolically kill their own femininity.
Hobby hunters typically begin hunting independently right after puberty — a period that also includes other symbolic transitions such as driving and first sexual experiences. Out hunting, they feel like men.
Most of the male animals shot possess feminine attributes such as grace and beauty. Hunting itself, however, requires that hobby hunters prefer to be among themselves and to withdraw from female influence. Hunting trips are usually an exclusively male affair. Instead of washing themselves, hunters smear themselves with “scent attractants” — a euphemistic term for urine and excrement. They do not wash because residues from detergents reflect ultraviolet light that can be detected by game, rendering any camouflage useless. They also wear boots inside the hunting cabin, swear, play poker, drink alcohol straight from the bottle, and eat out of cans.
In 1974, James Kennedy of the Wildlife Society conducted a study which showed that 75% of the hunters surveyed preferred to hunt with their companions in an area where the chance of killing an animal was 10%, rather than hunting alone in a place where that chance was 50%. The killing was often merely a pretext for other rituals of “manhood” — to see “who is a softie.”
The atmosphere of exaggerated masculinity on a hunting trip is similar to the "leather" atmosphere in gay bars.
Gregory Hemingway, the son of writer Ernest Hemingway, would likely agree. His father was, for an entire generation, the living legend of a macho man and hunter. Wanting to impress him, Gregory won the World Life Pigeon Shooting Championship (a competition involving the shooting of live pigeons) at just 11 years old. At 19, he was arrested for transvestism. In an attempt to regain his father's respect, he next slaughtered 18 elephants on a single safari in Africa. Yet he remained an unhappy transvestite who — as he admitted in a 1987 interview — spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” trying to overcome it. He was never homosexual, merely insecure — much like his father, who equally spent his entire life having to prove his masculinity, even though no one had ever called it into question.
Today we know:
- Those who go hunting as adolescents are predisposed in later life to using violence against people and other animals.
- Those who go hunting display a lower level of empathy than those who do not hold a hunting licence.
As a rule, hobby hunters recount that they first experienced a hunt at the tender age of 6 to 12 years old. Typically, it is fathers and grandfathers who introduce their sons, grandsons, daughters, and granddaughters to the reprehensible activity for the first time. These are unempathetic parents who emotionally abuse, exploit, manipulate, and take advantage of children for their own interests. Such treatment distorts a child's sense of self-worth and later manifests in abnormal patterns of behaviour. Children raised in this manner will most likely lack empathy, responsibility, and kindness towards other living beings in later life.
The characteristics of hobby hunters in later life include an exaggerated sense of their own importance, an inability to empathise with other living beings, and a failure to develop empathy and compassion. Also notable is their tendency to exaggerate, lie, seek to impress, and deceive. A hobby hunter essentially behaves like an impostor. He has great difficulty responding adequately to criticism directed at him — he is immediately offended and strikes back. All of these are traits that also appear prominently in narcissistic personality disorders.
Narcissistic personalities strive for power because in this way they can induce or, to a certain extent, compel other people to give them recognition. Narcissists want to be admired. And when they have power, they can, so to speak, buy this recognition and admiration from other people. This is why power and narcissism are very closely linked, explains psychoanalyst Prof. Hans-Jürgen Wirth.
Just as the paedophile is a great lover of children, the hobby hunter, with his distorted understanding of stewardship and care, believes himself to be an even greater lover of animals. The legislature places dangerous weapons in the hands of this violent individual, filled with hunters' tall tales, weapons with which he is permitted to shoot up nature without any logic or scientific and wildlife-biological guidelines.
Animal cruelty is not a tradition
Animal abusers are typically male and white.
As early as November 1999, Clifton P. Flynn demonstrated in a study (Exploring the Link between Corporal Punishment and Children’s Cruelty to Animals) that the more often boys were beaten by their fathers during childhood and adolescence, the more they later mutated into animal abusers. This development does not occur when boys are beaten by their mothers, or in the case of girls who are beaten by their parents.
Through hunting, young people lose their sense of cruelty; moreover, it entitles them to do whatever it takes to obtain an antler (the symbol of masculinity). In this way, killing becomes a casual, thoughtless act.
Psychologists have long concluded, on the basis of case analyses that young people who are exposed to hunting early and intensively lose their sensitivity and that killing becomes unnaturally easy for them.
In Japan there is a folk belief that all hunted animals have the potential to take revenge on the hunter in a reciprocal relationship for the suffering he has inflicted upon them. The fear is not only of a hunting accident; hobby hunters in Japan fear the spirits of dead animals far more. For when the hobby hunter is successful, he creates a restless, poorly dispatched, and vengeful spirit.
Just like love, violence always acts in both directions. If you give someone a smile, you receive one in return. As you call into the forest, so it echoes back — these too are well-known folk wisdoms.
At the point where violence is unleashed, damage is caused just as much as at the point toward which it is directed. And this in a remarkably concrete sense, even at the neuronal level. Scientists have discovered this through studies of soldiers and serial killers. Neuropsychologists also confirm: the amygdala, a core region of the brain, is noticeably atrophied or impaired in perpetrators of violence. When this central part of the brain is defective, the sense of disgust, among other things, is switched off.
Anyone who obtains a hunting licence therefore always receives two things: a licence to kill and a licence to become mentally dulled.
More on this in the dossier: Psychology of Hunting
Interessen-Gemeinschaft Wild beim Wild
The IG Wild beim Wild is a non-profit advocacy group committed to the sustainable and non-violent improvement of the human-animal relationship, with a specialisation in the legal aspects of wildlife protection. One of our primary concerns is the introduction of a contemporary and serious wildlife management system in the cultural landscape, modelled on the Canton of Geneva — without hobby hunters, but with individuals of integrity who truly merit the title of wildlife warden and act in accordance with a code of honour. The monopoly on the use of force belongs in the hands of the state. The IG supports scientific methods of immunocontraception for wildlife.
