A
Anja Heister
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
Dr. Scalia’s excellent Why Does Anyone Kill a Wolf? A Psychoanalytic Contribution directs our attention inward, toward the psychopathology that underlies the desire to pursue and kill an animal as socially complex, autonomous, and symbolically powerful as a wolf. According to Scalia, the self-authorization to trophy hunt or commercially trap wolves is associated with a development disruption—”profound disturbances”—during early childhood and long before the acquisition of language, and “thus to which the child can only respond by a malformation in their very personhood foundation.” Scalia addresses the psychopath and neurotic as two outcomes of this malformation and cites as two examples, Cody Roberts in WY, who gleefully tortured a young wolf before killing her, and Montana’s Rep. Paul Fielder, who has clearly no empathy for other beings, likens wolves and their pups to ‘mere’ wasps, and relentlessly argues for more killing of wolves. Scalia warns that we cannot afford to ignore wolf de-sentient-ization, because silence on the issue would be as damaging as the crime itself.
In this spirit, the next question is why the desire to kill so readily becomes socially sanctioned violence against wild animals. Whatever psychopathological motives lead someone to derive pleasure, status, excitement, or satisfaction from killing a wolf, bear, mountain lion, “furbearer” such as a bobcat or beaver, or any other wild animal, where do these otherwise unacceptable motivations gain acceptance, promotion, admiration, and reward?
This is the point at which psychoanalysis becomes socio-political critique where we turn from the psyche of the killers to the institutions that give human supremacy, aggression, violence, “unprocessed fury” as in Roberts’ case, and impulses to kill another living and sentient being, a home or legitimate shelter.
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM) provides precisely this institutional shelter where the pursuit, torture and killing of wild animals is being translated from private desire into publicly authorized and sanctioned conduct. License, season, quota, “harvest,” trophy, and management objectives become legitimizing structures. They do not tell us why any particular person kills, but they provide a socially acceptable vocabulary through which motives involving a human supremacy worldview, domination, aggression, violence, status, excitement, or emotional disengagement from animal suffering become difficult to distinguish from ordinary participation in wildlife management.
Created historically by wealthy and influential ‘sport hunters’ such as Teddy Roosevelt, for hunters, with the intent to exclude the benign public (those of us who want to protect wild animals from human harms), the NAM has organized wildlife governance around (trophy) hunting, trapping and other lethal actions against wild animals, converted sentient individuals into categories of “predators,” “furbearers,” “game,” to be “harvested,” and embeds their killing within the respectable language of conservation, management, tradition, and recreation utilizing concepts such as ‘fair chase’ to ensure public acceptance of the activities.
State and federal agencies closely follow the NAM’s seven principles; (1) Wildlife are a public trust, (2) Markets for game/wildlife are eliminated, (3) Allocation of wildlife is by law, (4) Wildlife can be killed only for legitimate purpose, (5) Wildlife is considered an international resources, (6) Science is the proper tool to discharge wildlife policy, and (7) Democracy of hunting is standard. In doing so, they create a cultural and bureaucratic setting where individuals, mostly men, motivated by the excitement of ‘taking,’ harassing, harming, pursuing, stalking, shooting, wounding, trapping, capturing and killing or exercising power over autonomous animals can pursue those impulses under the socially sanctioned guise of wildlife management. As one prominent NAM promoter once noted, One does not hunt to kill, one kills in order to have hunted. This sentiment expresses that the non-vital and frivolous interest of the human hunter is prioritized over the vital interest of the wild animal to stay alive. The NAM thereby accommodates, normalizes, promotes, rewards, and conceals troubling motivations, including a human supremacy worldview, aggression, violence, and a lack of empathy for others—traits that, outside wildlife conservation and management, would be immediately recognized as warning signs of potential psychopathology.
In short, the NAM provides those otherwise unacceptable motivations with legitimacy, opportunity, community, vocabulary, and protection from moral scrutiny. It is a near perfect system in which pathology supplies the impulse to kill, culture supplies the justification, law supplies the license, regulations supply restraint and restrictions of seasons and quota, and the NAM supplies the institutional shelter for all the above.
While Scalia examines the individual psyche, my book, Beyond the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation: From Lethal to Compassionate Conservation, examines the NAM as the institutional structure that authorizes and normalizes cruelty against wild animals, and in one of the chapters, I expose some of the crimes committed against wild animals by hunters and trappers, and sheltered by the NAM in the name of ‘conservation.’
The chapter challenges one of the central assumptions of conventional American wildlife management: That practices become ethically legitimate simply because government agencies classify them as hunting, trapping, ‘harvest,’ predator management, or conservation. But we must look beyond this institutional, misleading vocabulary and consider what actually happens to individual wild animals. Viewed from the perspective of the animal rather than the wildlife official, hunter or trapper, geographic places celebrated as hunting grounds or traplines become scenes of profound suffering—wolves shot or trapped and tragically lost to their mates and families, bear cubs who die of starvation after being separated from their mother, killed by a trophy hunter during Montana’s brutal Spring Bear Hunt, coyotes, foxes and bobcats killed en masse during Wildlife-Killing Contests, predators chased and run over by guys on recreational vehicles, so called Coyote Whackin,’ Prairie Dog Shootings, Poaching, and Trapping as Torture before Death when trapped animals are forced to struggle for hours or days in leghold traps and snares before drowning, or being shot, clubbed, strangled or stomped to death by the returning trapper.
This institutional normalization of violence and cruelty is reinforced by processes familiar from the psychological literature on moral disengagement and objectification. Euphemistic language distances human actors from the consequences of killing; animals become population units rather than individuals; sentient animals are treated as natural renewable resources, public or private property; trophies and pelts transform living beings into nonfeeling objects and things; their nonsensical killing is concealed behind positive terms such as ‘harvest.’ Repeated exposure to killing can make practices that the benign public regards as disturbing appear ordinary or even virtuous.
Predators expose this contradiction particularly clearly. Wolves, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes kill prey because they must eat and, in many cases, feed dependent young. Human recreational hunters kill elk and other ungulates by choice. Yet traditional wildlife governance treats the frivolous human desire for hunting and trapping as a legitimate management objective while treating the predator’s biological need for the same prey as competition to be controlled. Montana’s mismanagement of wild animals, especially the aggressive slaughter of wolves and other large carnivores is an example where predators are killed to preserve ungulates for human hunters to kill. Again, frivolous human interests versus essential need for survival disguised as wildlife management. Human supremacy receives shelter and institutional standing while the survival interests, social relationships, ecological importance, and subjective experiences of nonhuman animals are excluded from the management calculus.
I use trapping to provide perhaps the starkest illustration of the unjust and cruel NAM. A leghold trap or snare makes visible what bureaucratic abstractions such as “furbearer harvest” conceal. The captured animal experiences prolonged restraint, extreme pain and suffering, fear, injury, exposure, thirst, exhaustion, psychological and physical trauma, and is driven by pain and panic to extraordinary decisions: To self-amputation of their caught limb. Yet, the trapped animals’ incomprehensible experience of human-caused cruelty is of no concern to state and federal wildlife agencies as trapping is primarily evaluated at the level of populations, seasons, quotas, and permissible equipment. So long as enough members of a species remain, the suffering of the individual animal becomes administratively irrelevant. My chapter challenges this population-level moral blind spot: the fact that a population can sustain mortality tells us nothing about whether the suffering inflicted upon the individuals comprising that population is ethically defensible. Obviously, the pain and suffering is experienced by the individual and not by the ‘population.
I write about cruelty against wildlife not merely as a matter of individual behavior but as a problem of institutionalized violence, moral fragmentation and exclusion. American society often affords substantial protection and moral consideration to some animals, particularly companion animals, while legally permitting conduct toward free-living wildlife that would provoke outrage if inflicted upon a beloved family dog. This inconsistency exposes the importance of species categories created by humans—“pet,” “game animal,” “predator,” “furbearer,” “varmint”—in determining whose suffering matters and whose does not.
The deeper question raised by Crime Scenes in the Woods is therefore not simply why an individual kills a wolf. It is why our institutions provide a cultural, legal, and bureaucratic environment in which killing wildlife for whatever reason is normalized as recreation and conservation while the experiences of the animals themselves remain outside the ethical frame.
American civil rights activist and attorney, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” which holds that oppression systems within society, including racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, and speciesism, do not act independently from each other. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate and create a system of oppression that reflects the ‘intersection’ of multiple forms of discrimination. These conceptualizations are socially constructed to categorize sentient beings and then used to either value or devalue them.
Hunting and trapping do not just constitute individuals’ choices that can be rationalized away by explaining that it benefits one’s recreation, economic profit, tradition, lifestyle, or mental health. Regardless of who is the recipient of violence—women, children, domestic and wild animals—we know today that violence does not occur in isolation and may affect us all. From individuals, families to the community, through all strata of society, the disregard for individual sentient lives and the inherent lack or absence of empathy for ‘others’—the moral glue that holds human societies together—violence should be of great social concern.
The harming and killing of unsuspecting, unoffending, and defenseless animals should be treated seriously and as issues of immediate societal concern. Trophy hunting and trapping involve an unacceptable absence of respect and empathy for the lives of individual wild animals while allowing an incomprehensible level of violence and cruelty against them. NAM proponents’ enjoyment of killing animals for pleasure is ethically unacceptable behavior and detrimental to society’s efforts to increase pro-social behavior. While purchasing a license makes killing wild animals legal, it cannot make the killing ethical. And that is only one reason why hunting and trapping should not be called ‘wildlife conservation.’
Dr. Scalia’s rightly urges us that “we cannot afford for the psychopathology of wolf de-sentient-ization to remain a censored topic. Omitting its discourse is as damaging as committing the crime.” Nor can we afford to avoid critiquing—and ultimately dismantling—state and federal lethal wildlife management under the NAM, which shelters those who kill wildlife.
In this spirit, the next question is why the desire to kill so readily becomes socially sanctioned violence against wild animals. Whatever psychopathological motives lead someone to derive pleasure, status, excitement, or satisfaction from killing a wolf, bear, mountain lion, “furbearer” such as a bobcat or beaver, or any other wild animal, where do these otherwise unacceptable motivations gain acceptance, promotion, admiration, and reward?
This is the point at which psychoanalysis becomes socio-political critique where we turn from the psyche of the killers to the institutions that give human supremacy, aggression, violence, “unprocessed fury” as in Roberts’ case, and impulses to kill another living and sentient being, a home or legitimate shelter.
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM) provides precisely this institutional shelter where the pursuit, torture and killing of wild animals is being translated from private desire into publicly authorized and sanctioned conduct. License, season, quota, “harvest,” trophy, and management objectives become legitimizing structures. They do not tell us why any particular person kills, but they provide a socially acceptable vocabulary through which motives involving a human supremacy worldview, domination, aggression, violence, status, excitement, or emotional disengagement from animal suffering become difficult to distinguish from ordinary participation in wildlife management.
Created historically by wealthy and influential ‘sport hunters’ such as Teddy Roosevelt, for hunters, with the intent to exclude the benign public (those of us who want to protect wild animals from human harms), the NAM has organized wildlife governance around (trophy) hunting, trapping and other lethal actions against wild animals, converted sentient individuals into categories of “predators,” “furbearers,” “game,” to be “harvested,” and embeds their killing within the respectable language of conservation, management, tradition, and recreation utilizing concepts such as ‘fair chase’ to ensure public acceptance of the activities.
State and federal agencies closely follow the NAM’s seven principles; (1) Wildlife are a public trust, (2) Markets for game/wildlife are eliminated, (3) Allocation of wildlife is by law, (4) Wildlife can be killed only for legitimate purpose, (5) Wildlife is considered an international resources, (6) Science is the proper tool to discharge wildlife policy, and (7) Democracy of hunting is standard. In doing so, they create a cultural and bureaucratic setting where individuals, mostly men, motivated by the excitement of ‘taking,’ harassing, harming, pursuing, stalking, shooting, wounding, trapping, capturing and killing or exercising power over autonomous animals can pursue those impulses under the socially sanctioned guise of wildlife management. As one prominent NAM promoter once noted, One does not hunt to kill, one kills in order to have hunted. This sentiment expresses that the non-vital and frivolous interest of the human hunter is prioritized over the vital interest of the wild animal to stay alive. The NAM thereby accommodates, normalizes, promotes, rewards, and conceals troubling motivations, including a human supremacy worldview, aggression, violence, and a lack of empathy for others—traits that, outside wildlife conservation and management, would be immediately recognized as warning signs of potential psychopathology.
In short, the NAM provides those otherwise unacceptable motivations with legitimacy, opportunity, community, vocabulary, and protection from moral scrutiny. It is a near perfect system in which pathology supplies the impulse to kill, culture supplies the justification, law supplies the license, regulations supply restraint and restrictions of seasons and quota, and the NAM supplies the institutional shelter for all the above.
While Scalia examines the individual psyche, my book, Beyond the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation: From Lethal to Compassionate Conservation, examines the NAM as the institutional structure that authorizes and normalizes cruelty against wild animals, and in one of the chapters, I expose some of the crimes committed against wild animals by hunters and trappers, and sheltered by the NAM in the name of ‘conservation.’
Crime Scenes in the Woods: The NAM and Cruelty Against Wild Animals
The chapter challenges one of the central assumptions of conventional American wildlife management: That practices become ethically legitimate simply because government agencies classify them as hunting, trapping, ‘harvest,’ predator management, or conservation. But we must look beyond this institutional, misleading vocabulary and consider what actually happens to individual wild animals. Viewed from the perspective of the animal rather than the wildlife official, hunter or trapper, geographic places celebrated as hunting grounds or traplines become scenes of profound suffering—wolves shot or trapped and tragically lost to their mates and families, bear cubs who die of starvation after being separated from their mother, killed by a trophy hunter during Montana’s brutal Spring Bear Hunt, coyotes, foxes and bobcats killed en masse during Wildlife-Killing Contests, predators chased and run over by guys on recreational vehicles, so called Coyote Whackin,’ Prairie Dog Shootings, Poaching, and Trapping as Torture before Death when trapped animals are forced to struggle for hours or days in leghold traps and snares before drowning, or being shot, clubbed, strangled or stomped to death by the returning trapper.
This institutional normalization of violence and cruelty is reinforced by processes familiar from the psychological literature on moral disengagement and objectification. Euphemistic language distances human actors from the consequences of killing; animals become population units rather than individuals; sentient animals are treated as natural renewable resources, public or private property; trophies and pelts transform living beings into nonfeeling objects and things; their nonsensical killing is concealed behind positive terms such as ‘harvest.’ Repeated exposure to killing can make practices that the benign public regards as disturbing appear ordinary or even virtuous.
Predators expose this contradiction particularly clearly. Wolves, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes kill prey because they must eat and, in many cases, feed dependent young. Human recreational hunters kill elk and other ungulates by choice. Yet traditional wildlife governance treats the frivolous human desire for hunting and trapping as a legitimate management objective while treating the predator’s biological need for the same prey as competition to be controlled. Montana’s mismanagement of wild animals, especially the aggressive slaughter of wolves and other large carnivores is an example where predators are killed to preserve ungulates for human hunters to kill. Again, frivolous human interests versus essential need for survival disguised as wildlife management. Human supremacy receives shelter and institutional standing while the survival interests, social relationships, ecological importance, and subjective experiences of nonhuman animals are excluded from the management calculus.
I use trapping to provide perhaps the starkest illustration of the unjust and cruel NAM. A leghold trap or snare makes visible what bureaucratic abstractions such as “furbearer harvest” conceal. The captured animal experiences prolonged restraint, extreme pain and suffering, fear, injury, exposure, thirst, exhaustion, psychological and physical trauma, and is driven by pain and panic to extraordinary decisions: To self-amputation of their caught limb. Yet, the trapped animals’ incomprehensible experience of human-caused cruelty is of no concern to state and federal wildlife agencies as trapping is primarily evaluated at the level of populations, seasons, quotas, and permissible equipment. So long as enough members of a species remain, the suffering of the individual animal becomes administratively irrelevant. My chapter challenges this population-level moral blind spot: the fact that a population can sustain mortality tells us nothing about whether the suffering inflicted upon the individuals comprising that population is ethically defensible. Obviously, the pain and suffering is experienced by the individual and not by the ‘population.
I write about cruelty against wildlife not merely as a matter of individual behavior but as a problem of institutionalized violence, moral fragmentation and exclusion. American society often affords substantial protection and moral consideration to some animals, particularly companion animals, while legally permitting conduct toward free-living wildlife that would provoke outrage if inflicted upon a beloved family dog. This inconsistency exposes the importance of species categories created by humans—“pet,” “game animal,” “predator,” “furbearer,” “varmint”—in determining whose suffering matters and whose does not.
The deeper question raised by Crime Scenes in the Woods is therefore not simply why an individual kills a wolf. It is why our institutions provide a cultural, legal, and bureaucratic environment in which killing wildlife for whatever reason is normalized as recreation and conservation while the experiences of the animals themselves remain outside the ethical frame.
American civil rights activist and attorney, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” which holds that oppression systems within society, including racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, and speciesism, do not act independently from each other. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate and create a system of oppression that reflects the ‘intersection’ of multiple forms of discrimination. These conceptualizations are socially constructed to categorize sentient beings and then used to either value or devalue them.
Hunting and trapping do not just constitute individuals’ choices that can be rationalized away by explaining that it benefits one’s recreation, economic profit, tradition, lifestyle, or mental health. Regardless of who is the recipient of violence—women, children, domestic and wild animals—we know today that violence does not occur in isolation and may affect us all. From individuals, families to the community, through all strata of society, the disregard for individual sentient lives and the inherent lack or absence of empathy for ‘others’—the moral glue that holds human societies together—violence should be of great social concern.
The harming and killing of unsuspecting, unoffending, and defenseless animals should be treated seriously and as issues of immediate societal concern. Trophy hunting and trapping involve an unacceptable absence of respect and empathy for the lives of individual wild animals while allowing an incomprehensible level of violence and cruelty against them. NAM proponents’ enjoyment of killing animals for pleasure is ethically unacceptable behavior and detrimental to society’s efforts to increase pro-social behavior. While purchasing a license makes killing wild animals legal, it cannot make the killing ethical. And that is only one reason why hunting and trapping should not be called ‘wildlife conservation.’
Dr. Scalia’s rightly urges us that “we cannot afford for the psychopathology of wolf de-sentient-ization to remain a censored topic. Omitting its discourse is as damaging as committing the crime.” Nor can we afford to avoid critiquing—and ultimately dismantling—state and federal lethal wildlife management under the NAM, which shelters those who kill wildlife.