Academic joins stars including Dame Judi Dench on Ban Trophy Hunting campaign

Professor Geoffrie Beattie, who is based at Liverpool Edge Hill University, has profiled IRA terrorists.

And he says his studies have found that trophy hunters, who pay to shoot some of the most beautiful and rare animals, are in fact more dangerous.

Prof Beattie, who penned the book, ‘Trophy Hunting: A Psychological Perspective’, said: "There has been a lot of work around the relationship between people who are high on narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, which is often known as the “Dark Triad”.

"Trophy hunters use living creatures as a prop to make themselves feel better, to elevate their status. If you have no empathy, you do not really understand the suffering of the animal or you make little of their suffering or may even mock their suffering. What is notable about some trophy hunting pictures is that the trophy hunter seems to be mocking the dead animals, and that they are doing so to make themselves look better.

"It is as if they are taking these majestic animals and saying, 'I'm going to kill this thing to try to elevate myself as a human being.'

"That is really quite an extraordinary proposition. I have interviewed terrorists and very violent people. They would all generally steer away from trying to do anything like this because they would be aware of how people would respond. Yet trophy hunters post these things publicly in order to get affirmation, to get attention, to get the positive feedback which they feel they need from the world."

Prof Beattie has been studying the psychological phenomena around trophy hunting for a number of years, and has examined why some people kill living creatures for entertainment. In pursuit of this research he has listened to the arguments for trophy hunting and unpacked them in a psychological way.

He was intrigued by the way that trophy hunters talk about the ‘naturalness’ of hunting and about it as something that is rooted in our genes.

From an anthropological and evolutionary perspective, however, Prof Beattie found that it was always more than that.

He said: "It was always about signalling something. It gives the person who does it special status within the group. With modern trophy hunting, it has very little to do with skill or expertise. It has a lot to do with material wealth."

He explains that machiavellianism is another major dimension, as is psychopathy. One of the most important attributes in psychopaths is that they are very low in empathy. They do not have the same emotional response to certain situations that other people have. It is not that they lack all of the mechanisms of empathy; they are not getting the right emotional response to the suffering of other people or things.

Their neural pathways simply do not respond in the way that they do in other people. There are certain emotions which they are very poor at processing, such as fear and sadness. If they watch someone going through a situation which is making them very sad, they do not feel genuine empathy. They can ‘do’ the sympathy response, but they do not feel it.

He adds: "This is all relevant to trophy hunting for a number of reasons. First of all, cruelty to animals is one of those red flags for psychopathy. Psychopathy starts pretty early on in life, usually identifiable around the age of eight. The number of psychopaths who have animal cruelty in their background is high."

Every week UK trophy hunters are legally allowed to bring the animals they have killed back to this country to display in their homes, and the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting is calling on the Labour government to honour its manifesto commitment to end the import of animal trophies.

Endangered animals such as polar bears, tigers and rhinos are being killed by callous Brits, who live in ordinary residential areas around the UK.

Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting supporter Dame Judi Dench, said: "I have never understood people who want to hunt and kill wild animals. I've never understood the satisfaction people get from seeing a wild animal dead and they have killed it or hunted it down. I don't understand the point of it, I'm afraid.

"If you see something like a leopard hunting an impala or something like that you are enthralled by it, but they are hunting for food. We hunt to show off, what is the point of that? I say it should stop. Trophy hunting is cruel, archaic and cowardly."

To find out more about the campaign and sign the petition go to https://bantrophyhunting.org