Yes, hunters are psychopaths. Therefore, by extrapolation, we can conclude that sport hunting is serial killing.
Elk
©Jim Robertson,
Animals in the Wild - All Rights Reserved [used with permission]
Based on your response to yesterday’s post,
Are Hunters Psychopaths?
the answer is clear: Yes, hunters are psychopaths. Therefore, by
extrapolation, we can conclude that sport hunting is serial killing. There’s
no way of getting around it. Not unless you consider non-human animals to be
mere objects, possessions or “things,” but then you would be viewing them
the way a psychopath views his victims. The fact that society still
considers nonhumans as objects or possessions can only mean human society
shares some of the traits of a psychopath.
Objectification is one of the benchmark behaviors of psychopathy.
Consider the words of Aaron Thomas, the accused East Coast serial rapist who
says he doesn’t know why he couldn’t stop attacking women for nearly two
decades. “They were objects,” Thomas recently told The Washington Post
during a phone interview from his Virginia jail cell. “Whoever came down the
street, an object,” he said.
Struggling to understand himself, Thomas admitted, “I don’t think I’m crazy,
but something is wrong with me.” Yes, something is definitely wrong—it’s
called psychopathy. Though not considered a defensible form of insanity that
blurs the line between right and wrong, psychopathy is a disorder
characterized by an inability to empathize with others, often accompanied by
a compulsion to exploit, harm or kill in order to gain a sense of
self-worth. Sound a lot like trophy hunting? It’s the same deal. Thomas said
he carried out his attacks without regard for his victims. The same can
surely be said about sport hunters in regards to their victims.
Predictably, Thomas’s early behavior involved cruelty to animals. As a
youth, he dropped the family’s Lhasa apso into a post hole that had filled
with water, nearly drowning it. Showing more insight than most animal
abusers, Thomas told the Post, “I used to think to myself I could have
turned out a serial killer.”
It’s eerie, yet enlightening, how much the obsession described by Thomas
mirrors the preoccupation of an avid sport hunter. The following confession
by a “lifelong sportsman” was printed in Montana Outdoors magazine, under
the title, “Why I Hunt”:
“Why do I hunt? Well, I hunt because…. Yeah, right. As if there’s an
acceptable answer to that question, one I can regurgitate to nonhunters at
Christmas parties and still offer with a straight face to my fellow
sportsmen, people who already know in their hearts and guts and bones that
we hunt for the same reasons we breathe. Because we don’t have a choice.
Just as some human beings are born with the gift of artistic talent and
others have an innate facility with numbers, we hunters seem blessed with a
genetic predisposition toward the chase.”
It is a “predisposition,” and it’s shared by stalkers, sexual psychopaths
and serial killers. Sorry to burst their bubbles, but it’s not a blessing to
be proud of, and it’s certainly not something to brag about.