Trophies: The Pleasure Hunt

Violence and Desensitisation

When one's own life is filled with the self-evident exercise of real physical violence, habituation, numbing, and ultimately an ever-increasing desensitisation to violence sets in.

Recreational hobby hunting thus bites its own tail: it numbs and at the same time increases the need to exercise aggression of the supposedly stronger over the weaker for trophies.

This self-evidently practised law of the fist in turn leads to increasing brutalisation and dissolution of solidarity, growing egoism, lower frustration tolerance, and an ever-higher propensity for violence.

This negative transformation of the emotional world leads to a constantly intensifying one-sided tunnel vision of events in the world.The consequences of the suppressed alternatives ultimately form the basis for endlessly self-legitimising acts of aggression, hatred, rage, and violations of any verbal or physical kind.

The perpetrator of violence thus remains trapped in a constantly self-reproducing pattern and is therefore denied access to the more finely structured intellectual freedom of cultivated human beings.

The brain, conditioned in this way, can no longer even conceive of qualitatively different societies. It requires its imaginative capacity for purely destructive thoughts and associated fantasies.

The civilisational achievements of empathy, compassion, and so forth therefore remain simply and completely ignored or are held in contempt.

In a society that constantly readjusts its moral guardrails and has by now also ceased to accept, for example, the depiction and practice of smoking scenes and drinking binges, the depiction and enactment of violent fantasies by hobby hunters and their addiction to trophies is equally unacceptable.

The overwhelming abundance of kill-and-slaughter trips, during which — according to taste and budget, under the guise of animal welfare and species conservation— slaughtering, massacring, tormenting and shooting is permitted across the globe, speaks a clear language about this particular type of pursuit.

Trophy hunting as a phenomenon

One regards the social and sociological phenomenon of trophy hunting with corresponding unease, much like those dependent on tobacco in designated smoking corners, or a gathering of those inclined toward alcohol. One pities those who have evidently been numbed by life and who require an anachronistic, destructive form of entertainment.

Whoever observes a trophy hunter creeping through the bushes in the tremor of an overwhelming trigger-fever is in fact reminded of a small boy driven by fantasies of omnipotence, preoccupied with green “military hardware,” with so many horsepower, range, penetrating power, and so on — like an adolescent running on a hormone-driven alpha-male programme.

He is also free to dream of clearing the entire forest, the whole landscape, and every dinosaur within it with a super-giant bulldozer. “Boom, gone with it!”

The only problem is when the destruction programme can no longer be switched off.

These uninhibited individuals then proceed to bulldoze across the planet in a hormonal chaos mode, never finding their way back to the center of real, rational, responsible life. The collateral damage wrought by these shameless, boundless, unrestrained “bulldozer operators” can be observed everywhere on our planet: tormented animals, ecocide, burning forests, exploited resources and ruthless capitalist plundering are ruining and destroying our future. Through their acceptance of violence and their mockery of empathy, these apocalyptic horsemen have long since rung in our downfall.

Anyone who takes pleasure in killing suffers from a severe personality disorder, which in those affected is accompanied by an almost complete absence of empathy and pangs of conscience.

When individuals with such a Psychopathy seeing other living beings suffer and die stimulates a region in their brain (striatum/amygdala) known for experiencing indifferent pleasure whenever they are able to inflict agony, fear, and pain upon fellow creatures.

Such acts of violence and aggression experienced as pleasurable thus stem from highly pathological deficits in brain function and are typically accompanied by unbridled aggressive and threatening verbal outbursts whenever a humanely developed society demands restraint and compassion.

Trophy hunters therefore dismiss the value of cultural advancement just as readily as they dismiss the “value” of a living animal. Instead, worth is measured by the trophies that can be hacked from its body. Such deficits in empathy are the foundation of all warfare.

Whether directed against humans or animals — observing the heavily armed hobby hunters as they “bravely” set out in camouflage against their victims, laden with high-tech military equipment and heavy ammunition belts, accompanied by entourages and staff, equipped with jeeps and night-vision devices, dogs and every conceivable instrument of killing — one is more readily reminded of a Monty Python satire than of any of the supposedly grand planned exploits.

One might laugh in amusement at these “heroes”, were they not so mercilessly slaughtering, hacking apart, and decapitating wildlife with their arsenal of weapons.

To accompany this, the eternally antiquated theatrical drama is performed: “Brave hobby hunter presents himself victoriously after completing his heroic deed.” Superman revealingly drapes himself in an exhibitionistic pose beside the painstakingly arranged carcasses, pointing triumphantly at trophies and weapons, as though he has just narrowly escaped mortal danger.

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

The world, however, has turned in the meantime and has civilized itself with the maturation of the cerebral cortex.

One now draws parallels between cadaver shooting and the self-inflated, prostituting, sadistic, disgust-inducing psychopaths in the bullfighting arenas. Their similarly ridiculous posturing, the equally proudly displayed lust for killing, the entire attendant repulsive slaughter-madness, and the repellently arrogant megalomania provoke nothing but a gag reflex. It is simply not possible to vomit as thoroughly as one could retch over these animal butchers. More on the topic Animal welfare issues and Crime and hunting.