Trophies: The Lust Hunt

Violence and desensitization

When one's life is full of real physical violence that is acted out as a matter of course, it leads to habituation, numbness, and ultimately to an ever-increasing desensitization to violence.

Hobby hunting is therefore a vicious cycle: it dulls the senses and at the same time increases the need for the supposedly stronger to exert aggression over the weaker for trophies.

This self-evident exercise of the right of might, in turn, leads to increasing brutality and lack of solidarity, increasing selfishness, lower frustration tolerance, and an ever-greater willingness to use violence.

This negative shift in one's emotional landscape leads to a constantly intensifying, one-sided tunnel vision of world events. The consequences of overlooking alternative perspectives ultimately form the basis for self-justifying aggression, hatred, anger, and attacks of any kind, whether verbal or physical.

The perpetrator of violence thus remains trapped in a constantly reproducing pattern and is therefore prevented from accessing the more finely structured intellectual freedom of cultured people.

A brain associated with such patterns can no longer even conceive of qualitatively different societies. It needs its imagination for purely destructive thoughts and related fantasies.

The civilizational achievements of empathy, compassion, etc., are therefore simply ignored or ridiculed.

In a society that constantly readjusts its moral guidelines and now, for example, no longer accepts the depiction and practice of smoking scenes and drinking orgies, the depiction and practice of violent fantasies by hobby hunters and their addiction to trophies is equally unacceptable.

Therefore, the excessive availability of murder and manslaughter trips, during which, according to whim and budget, one may slaughter, massacre, torture and shoot animals worldwide under the guise of animal welfare and species conservation, speaks volumes about this particular type of occupation.

Lust hunting as a phenomenon

The socio-political phenomenon of the pursuit of pleasure is viewed with a certain unease, much like the attitude towards addicts in designated smoking areas or gatherings of alcoholics. One feels pity for those who are clearly jaded by life and require an outdated, destructive form of entertainment.

Anyone observing a pleasure hunter creeping through the bushes in the trembling heat of an overwhelming frenzy of shooting is reminded of a little boy driven by fantasies of omnipotence, preoccupied with green "defense technology", with so much horsepower, range, penetration, etc., like a pubescent boy in a hormone-driven alpha male program.

He's allowed to dream of clearing the entire forest, the whole landscape, and all the dinosaurs within it with a super-giant bulldozer. "Bang, away with it!"

The only problem is when you can no longer turn off the destruction program.

Then these uninhibited individuals, in a state of hormonal chaos, will henceforth scour the planet, never finding their way back to the center of real, rational, and responsible living. The collateral damage of these unashamed, excessive, and unrestrained "excavator operators" can be observed everywhere on our planet: tortured animals , ecocide, burning forests, exploited resources, and ruthless capitalist plunder are ruining and destroying our future. By accepting violence and mocking empathy, these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have long since heralded our downfall.

Those who derive pleasure from killing suffer from a severe personality disorder, which in those affected is accompanied by an almost complete lack of empathy and conscience.

When individuals with such psychopathy see other living beings suffer and die, this stimulates a region in their brain (striatum/amygdala) that is known to feel indifferent pleasure as soon as they can inflict torment, fear, and pain on fellow creatures.

According to this view, such acts of violence and aggression, experienced with pleasure, stem from highly pathological brain function deficits and are usually accompanied by unbridled aggressive and threatening verbal outbursts as soon as a humanely developed society demands moderation and compassion.

Lust hunters dismiss the value of cultural progress as readily as they disregard the "value" of a living animal. Instead, they measure it by the value of the trophies that can be hacked from its body. Such deficits of empathy are the foundation of all warfare.

Whether against humans or against animals, when one observes the heavily armed hobby hunters, laden with high-tech military equipment and heavy cartridge belts, with entourage and personnel, with jeep and vision equipment, with dogs and every conceivable murder weapon, bravely setting out against their victims in camouflage clothing, one is more likely to associate it with a Monty Python satire than with one of the prescribed planned great deeds.

One could laugh at these "heroes" if they didn't so mercilessly slaughter, hack to pieces, and decapitate the animal world with their war arsenal.

Then, the same old-fashioned theatrical trope is added: "A brave amateur hunter presents himself victoriously after a heroic deed." Superman drapes himself in a revealingly exhibitionistic manner next to the painstakingly prepared carcasses, triumphantly pointing at trophies and weapons as if he had just escaped a mortal danger.

The cowardly ambush is long forgotten. Because now comes the most important part: the trophy shoot in front of the camera. Click, click, click. Posing the carcass from every angle. A carcass show for the World Wide Web and the family album.

But the world has changed in the meantime, and it has become more civilized with the maturation of the cerebral cortex.

Now, parallels are being drawn between the shooting of corpses and the pompous, prostituted, sadistic, disgusting psychopaths in bullfighting arenas. Their similarly ridiculous behavior, their equally proud display of bloodlust, the entire associated repugnant killing frenzy, and their repulsively arrogant megalomania only evoke nausea. It is impossible to vomit as thoroughly as one could vomit at these animal butchers. More on the topic of animal welfare issues , crime, and hunting .