There is much talk in ‘game shooting’ circles of “respect for the quarry”. Indeed this is regularly put forward as the most important rule of shooting. Last week the Ferret published an article (amenden on Saturday) that showed just how much ‘respect’ some hunters actually have for the animals they kill. On The Ferret website you can read their report and see the film of a stag being shot and left to die slowly while people chuckle and congratulate the shooter. Strangely this dreadful piece of film seems to have been made by someone in the shooting party not as an expose but as a memento of the event.

The British Deer Society (BDS) has apparently commented in a now deleted post on their Facebook page that the “BDS continues to investigate the video and in no way condones this type of bad practice”. Many people would describe this type of behaviour in far stronger terms than ‘bad practice’. The details of this particular case may be further exposed to the light of publicity or they may simply disappear into the darkness that surrounds much activity of this sort. Time will tell but meanwhile we wondered why do this and why film it?

There has been much work done over the years on the psychology of so called ‘sport hunting’ and the conclusions are interesting. Dr. Karl Menninger (1893-1990) the renowned American psychiatrist developed the Erotic Sadistic Motivation Theory of sport hunting. In it he suggests that “Sadism may take a socially acceptable form [such as deer hunting and deer stalking] and other varieties of so-called ‘sport,’”  yet “These all represent the destructive and cruel energies of man directed toward more helpless creatures.” Menniger’s theory was taken up by many other psychiatrists, psychologists and neurologists including Dr. Joel R. Saper (University of Michigan), who theorizes that hunting ‘may reflect a profound yet subtle psychosexual inadequacy.’ Work in psychiatry suggests that with time the killing no longer satisfies and more and more animals need to be killed to achieve satiation. Filming the event gives the party the opportunity to ‘re-play’ the it multiple times and has been often noted in those who use commercial or home made pornography for sexual stimulation.

There is a huge body of work on the connections between ‘sport hunting’ and sexual uncertainty and inadequacy and it is not possible to do more than scrape the surface in this blog. Clearly this is a sensitive subject but one that should be more fully explored particularly where connections with domestic abuse are suggested. It does however do much to explain the desperate quest to produce greater numbers of animals to kill.