Sadism is defined as when a person experiences pleasure or satisfaction by humiliating, oppressing or inflicting pain on others.
There is undoubtedly a scientific relationship between violence against animals and violence against humans.
From an ethical point of view, there is now a social duty to take preventive action in cases of sadism.
The aggression toward animals by hobby hunters is an expression of a behavioral disorder. Violence against animals – violence against humans – this theory is supported by an increasing number of scientific studies .
Differences between hobby hunters and serial killers?
Both have a hunting instinct and a strong desire for power and control. Hunting can be an early symptom of a dangerous psychopathy, which isn’t limited to animals. Many studies show that acts of violence against animals demand our full attention!
Both serial killers and hobby hunters feel they’re participating in something important. Brain abnormalities are strikingly common in violent offenders. Violence leaves traces in the brain after a short time. Neuropsychologists confirm: The amygdala, a core brain area, is noticeably atrophied or dysfunctional in violent offenders. If this central part of the brain is defective, the sense of disgust, among other things, is deactivated.
When killing, both experience similar sensations, as when consuming illegal drugs. A temporary sense of relief and calm pervades their bodies and minds – until they have to search for another victim. It cannot be denied that recreational hunting also encourages other illegal activities , such as poaching, arms smuggling, criminality, alcohol abuse, etc., and promotes sociopathy.
Hunting weapons lead to abuse in all of our social lives. Gun suicides, threats, and fatal tragedies occur time and again. Year after year, countless people are killed and injured by recreational hunters and their weapons, sometimes so severely that they are confined to wheelchairs or have to have limbs amputated.
Animals, like humans, play an important role in our existence. They also show us how important it is to share, since we humans are not the only living beings on the planet.
Hunting is the dark shadow that torments wild animals. Hunting is like prostitution. Gamekeepers and licensed hunters pay a sum of money to indulge their passion, to indulge their urge to kill. The authorities in Switzerland even organize specially attractive hunts for their own glory.
According to experts, pornography is a key factor in stimulating the fantasies of serial killers, especially bondage and sadomasochism, where victims can be dominated and controlled.
Relevant militant hunting magazines are full of images of hobby hunters holding weapons and posing in a dominating position over their prey. Such magazines stimulate hunters’ desire to hunt even more, even in other countries. Hunters need such photographs and films to feel important.
Hobby hunters have a strong desire to do something heroic, to satisfy their sense of self-worth through the act of killing. Hunters don’t shy away from abusing children . They use their sectarian hunting jargon to advertise their passion for violence. Children and young people have a great love for animals, and hobby hunters place weapons and atrocities in their hands, which contradicts the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
What hunters and serial killers also have in common is the desire to collect trophies from their victims. Both love to stalk, searching for victims for their next act of violence.
“I don’t mean to imply that most hunters are weak people, but in my experience, weak people often use the opportunity to compensate for their flaw by hunting or playing around with guns and knives.”Quote from the non-fiction book “The Soul of the Assassin” by FBI profiler John Douglas.
Hobby hunters have been subjected to psychological and sociological studies in both Europe and the USA and compared with non-hunters on various aspects. The results clearly show that hobby hunters do not have a greater connection to nature than non-hunters, have a more negative attitude towards issues of animal welfare, the environment, and nature conservation, and generally display a greater tendency towards aggressive behavior – a typical characteristic of meat eaters. The hunter’s love of animals and nature does not delight in the existence of the beloved object; rather, it aims to possess the beloved creature, body and soul, and culminates in turning it into prey through the act of killing . Nowhere is this more evident than in hunting narratives – in practically every issue of popular hunting magazines.
Even though hunters have different personality traits, hobby hunters are ultimately all united by the same behavior: violent treatment of peaceful animals and nature, often purely for fun, recreation, or even sport, as well as the poisoning of nature with lead-containing ammunition. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts speak of psychological defects in hunters in connection with hunting. Hobby hunters want to kill!
“ , you acquire a license to kill. The popular belief that someone with a hunting license is not entirely sane probably has a kernel of truth – like most popular wisdom. And in fact, we don’t know how many psychopaths, gun nuts, or addicts there are among those who are legally allowed to handle firearms. Nor do we know who among those applying for a hunting license only wants to take the hunter’s exam so they can legally acquire firearms. We don’t know, the authorities don’t know, the hunting associations don’t know – and they’d rather not know,” explains KH.
Christian Lüdke is a psychotherapist, trains special police units and focuses primarily on the psychology of perpetrators.
Lüdke: ” Such people lead a double life. Deep down, they feel like absolute failures – family-wise, professionally, and sexually – and are driven by an extreme desire for power. Because they can’t put this into practice in everyday life, they have to do it through such acts of violence and seek out the weakest victims .”
How can you recognize such a person?
Lüdke: “Outwardly, they are usually very inconspicuous. But in the life histories of these perpetrators, three symptoms often appear around the age of eleven: that they wet the bed again, that they play with fire, and, above all, that they torture animals.”
Are these isolated cases?
Lüdke: ” Unfortunately not. There are many people among us who have such high levels of sexual, criminal energy that they’re practically ticking time bombs.”
Hobby hunter Frank Gust
Frank Gust is a German serial killer sentenced to life imprisonment followed by preventive detention. As we learn from an interview , his career began with animal cruelty and animal killing. It’s worth noting that Frank Gust was trained as a hobby hunter by his mother, a former hobby hunter, and thus legally acquired firearms. Just as he had learned how to disembowel animal carcasses from his mother, he later also used the same approach to killing people. In retrospect, his mother regretted this hunting training and spoke of it as a mistake:
“…They should have arrested me for failing so badly. I used to be a hunter, and I also trained Frank to be one. That includes butchering game. And since he dismembered the bodies, let’s say, professionally, I thought I’d taught him.“
In an interview with Petra Klages, hunting license holder Frank Gust reported on his personal experiences with hunting and openly criticized the claim that hobby hunters are always also nature conservationists:
“Some certainly are. But the majority of the people I met there were a mixture of class prejudice and hypocrisy.“.Frank Gust
When asked whether the aim was not to protect nature and animals, Gust continued that in his experience it was more about “ building a wonderful camouflage for other desires under the guise of the oh-so-noble act of hunting” .
When asked by the interviewer if he had any examples of this, Frank Gust described two incidents that cannot be recounted in full here. However, to give an idea, let us briefly mention the incident Gust recalled on a rabbit hunt:
“There was a supposedly experienced and highly respected hunter. He shot a rabbit… he could have used a safe shot from a few meters away, but waited until it had moved a bit longer, so he wouldn’t be able to hit it as perfectly with the shotgun because it would then squirm longer. It wasn’t about getting a good kill or protecting the population; it was simply about making it hurt. Of course, they don’t say anything about that officially.”Frank Gust
Clinical picture of sadism in hobby hunters
If we could look into the subconscious mind of hobby hunting, we would find a Pandora’s box of suppressed problems.
The renowned psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger (1893-1990), who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter in 1981 and who named the Menninger School of Psychiatry, wrote extensively about the erotic sadistic motivation theory in hunting. “Sadism can take a socially acceptable form (such as deer hunting and deer watching) and other varieties of so-called ‘hunting practices,'” he writes. “These all represent the destructive and cruel energies of men directed toward more helpless creatures.”
The symptoms of hobby hunters only allow for a limited degree of pleasurable experience and emotional stability. To achieve the desired stimulation, these fantasies are expanded, for example, through trophy hunts abroad. Sometimes they get so out of hand that hobby hunters even kill people. The media on homicides or other criminal activities by the problem group “hobby hunters,” such as the recent attack (carried out by a hobby hunter) in front of the UBS branch in Zurich in February 2018.
“Animal protection always means protecting people, too. Those who don’t understand this are, with their lack of understanding, causing us to ‘shoot ourselves in the foot.'”Volker Mariak
German studies and specialist publications on the topic of “Violence against humans – Violence against animals”:
| Year | Authors | Study / Technical Paper |
| 1988 | Wochner, M. and Klosinski G. | “Child and adolescent animal abusers with psychiatric problems” |
| 1998 | Berg, C. | “Horse slitting – A form of brutal animal cruelty” |
| 1998 | Füllgrabe, U. | “On the motivation of the horse rippers” |
| 2003 | Kaplan, Astrid | “On the psychological connection between violence against animals and violence against humans with particular emphasis on the related intra- and interpersonal psychodynamics.” |
| 2003 | Vitt-Mugg. V. | “Sexual sadistic serial offenders” |
| 2004 | Harbort, Stephan | “The morbid imagination and experience of sadistic serial killers” |
| 2005 | Stupperich, A. | “From Fantasy to Action – Animal Cruelty” |
| 2006 | Harbort, Stephan | “The Serial Killer Principle: What Compels People to Evil” |
| 2007 | Heubrock Dietmar, Parildayan-Metz, Dorothee | “Who would do something like that?” |
| 2009 | Sevecke, Kathrin, Krischer, Maya | “Animal cruelty and personality pathology in delinquent boys and girls. Results from the Cologne study.” |
| n.d. | Faust, Volker | “Animal cruelty – what kind of people are these young perpetrators?” |
| 2010 | Kaplan, Astrid | “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields. On the need for a quantum leap in compassion.” |
| 2017 | Klages, Petra | “The Rhine-Ruhr Ripper Frank Gust Interviews” |
Interest group Wild at Wild
The IG Wild beim Wild is a non-profit interest group dedicated to the sustainable and non-violent improvement of human-animal relations. The IG also specializes in the legal aspects of wildlife conservation. One of our primary concerns is to introduce modern and reputable wildlife management in the cultural landscape, following the model of the Canton of Geneva – without hobby hunters, but with gamekeepers of integrity who truly deserve the name and act according to a code of honor. The monopoly on the use of force belongs in the hands of the state. The IG supports scientific methods of immunocontraception for wild animals.
Exposing the Big Game 