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To: unspun
“The Most Dangerous Game” is a great short story, but I think part of its greatness is that it gives an imaginative reason for the psychopathic serial killer as opposed to a more realistic and banal sort such as Hannah Arndt found to be the case in her studies of Nazis.

Healthy animals kill each other leave much of the carcass behind all the time-— not to mention the fact that they play with their prey. Just watch a housecat around a mouse.

I doubt what you say about serial killers is correct. If it was, the number of serial killers would have been greatest in societies where children hunt for fun in addition to any other reasons—— yet the number of serial killers has grown while the practice of hunting, for fun or whatever other reason, has not.

You might have had a point if you changed “hunting” to “torturing”-— John Stuart Mill thought so. While I doubt Mill had any empirical evidence to that effect, either, I would distinguish hunting from, say, dog fighting such as Michael Vick is suspected of promoting. Hunting keeps the worlds of human and animal separate, so that the confusion you speak of is unlikely, whereas people who raise animals as pets only to mistreat them are closer in psychological terms to mistreating a member of his or her family.

248 posted on 06/11/2007 2:01:36 PM PDT by mjolnir ("All great change in America begins at the dinner table.")
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To: mjolnir

Do you really believe I wrote that serial killers get their start by hunting?


249 posted on 06/11/2007 2:24:25 PM PDT by unspun (What do you think? Please think, before you answer.)
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