ORDINARY BEASTS: Hunting and Cultural Psychopathy

By Howard Siegel

No behavioral abnormality evokes our collective revulsion more than the psychopathic personality. Thoughtless cruelty and the absence of empathy or compassion are hard for decent people to fathom. But many of the same "good people" who cringe in horror at the depravity of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Anthony DeSalvo will teach their children to engage in the exact behavior that started most psychopathic killers down the road to becoming monsters -- killing animals for fun. Hunters effectively teach children to get in touch with their inner psychopath - to take joy, pleasure, and be proud of killing. That is not hyperbole. It is the indisputable essence of teaching children that killing is a praiseworthy sport. What is unfathomable is that trophy hunting and hunting for the pure joy of killing have become cultural norms. Politicians cannot run for office without kowtowing to the "tradition of hunting" as if it were a mainstream branch of Christianity. This book examines the uncomfortable connection between psychopathy, psychopathic behavior, and the cultural norms that have made killing for amusement as American as a Norman Rockwell painting.Ordinary Beasts (Hunting and Cultural Psychopathy) explores one of the dark sides of human nature: The "sport" of killing animals for amusement. The modern hunter does not kill for the doctrinaire motivations of conservation, to get in touch with his ancient ancestral roots, to commune with nature, or even for fresh meat. These justifications are entirely incidental. He kills because he gets a kick out of stalking and killing. He kills for fun. Ordinary Beasts does not attempt to pay deference to the modern culture of hunting. It exposes the cultural practices of killing for a good time in the same way that the culture of female genital mutilation should be exposed - as an ethically unacceptable aberration completely at odds with the notions of human decency and compassion. Hunting is nothing more than animal sacrifice without the deity. It is an offering, instead, to the god of boredom. Some cultures deserve no quarter. Ordinary Beasts makes the case that sports hunting should be prominent on that list.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 107761683X
• ISBN13: 9781077616837
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 135 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"