La Italian Federation of Operators of Departments and Addiction Services (FeDerSerD) has just published in the June issue of Mission magazine - an article with a particular title: "Is hunting today a pathological addiction?". Starting from the analysis of the reasons that in the remote past could justify hunting, the author of the article highlights the concrete and direct differences between the reasons that pushed a Neolithic hunter to arm themselves with sharp flint points and those that are at the base of the hunting today, exercised by people equipped with every hi-tech accessory.
In both cases, an addiction is identified which, for the hunter of the past, is defined as physiological, because he went hunting "driven by basic emotional systems, for purposes of great biological value: to provide food for himself and his people "unlike the contemporary hunter who would have developed a pathological addiction, characterized by going" hunting pushed by identical basic emotional systems, but its behavior has lost the original biological value of ensuring the survival of itself and its species ". The analysis goes even deeper, identifying how the psychic mechanisms underlying the desire to hunt are of a primary type, "which occur at an archaic level of the brain, quite distinct from the cultural factors belonging to the tertiary processes, mediated by the cerebral cortex ".
What emerges from the article is the figure of a substantially "addicted" hunter, of a pathological addict to an activity that today has no sense of existing. "Those who love guns will be able to use them as myself at shooting ranges - concludes the author - who suffered from the irrepressible need ("craving") to shoot the wild, could use, as for gambling, suitable therapies at the public services for pathological addictions ".