In 2026 there are still those who hunt for fun. Why? An increasingly difficult question to avoid. An analysis published in 2021 by FeDerSerD in the magazine tries to give an answer Missionwhich puts an uncomfortable hypothesis on the table: hunting today can be considered a true pathological addiction. But to what extent?
To understand this we need to take a step back to the time when hunting was necessary. In the Neolithic it meant obtaining food, ensuring one’s own survival and that of the group. It was a primary drive, sure, but it had a precise biological sense.
Today, it is obvious that that context no longer exists: what we get to feed ourselves no longer depends on a rifle, yet the gesture remains. Shoot, chase, kill.
The study
According to FeDerSerD’s analysis, the emotional mechanisms underlying this behavior have remained the same: deep, archaic, rooted in a part of the brain that has little to do with rationality. What has certainly changed is everything else: if before that drive was functional to life, today it appears emptied of meaning. And when an impulse continues to repeat itself without a function, the line between addiction becomes thin, experts say.
This is also where one of the most used justifications falls: that of “tradition”. Because, the study explains, we cannot really talk about culture when we are dealing with such primary impulses. Rather, they are rationalizations: ways to give an acceptable guise to something that arises elsewhere, much deeper. So it can be said that it is not a cultural choice, but a push that seeks justification.
The picture that emerges is that of a new – or perhaps never truly recognized – figure of a hunter: someone who increasingly resembles a “addicted”, which responds to a need, to a cravingthrough behavior that is no longer necessary today.
A reading that was also echoed in the words of Massimo Vitturi of LAV, according to which in Italy there could be hundreds of thousands of people who need a therapeutic path.
It was evident even to the eyes of a layman that killing sentient beings for pure and exclusive entertainment could only be the result of a pathology – declares ùVitturi, head of LAV Animali Selvatici – but now this article provides solid scientific basis to support that in Italy there are around 500,000 people who need to be included in a therapeutic path.
But as this reflection opens, something happens that makes everything even more contradictory. A bill is being discussed in the Senate, renamed by many associations “DDL Sparatutto”, promoted by the minister Francesco Lollobrigida, which risks further expanding spaces and possibilities for hunting activities.
The DDL Shooter
In recent hours the topic has in fact returned to the center of the political debate because in Parliament a reform of the legislation on hunting is being discussed, often defined by associations and activists as the “Shooter Bill”, to make sense: the provision risks expanding the spaces, times and methods of hunting activity.
The bill is part of a broader review of the Wildlife Act. Among the most contested points would be the extension of hunting areas and periods, greater openness to the use of more “efficient” tools and methods and a strengthening of the role of hunters also in wildlife control activities.
Environmentalist associations, such as Legambiente and LAV, openly speak of a step backwards, highlighting that, while at a European level there is a push towards the protection of biodiversity and the reduction of human impact on ecosystems, Italy risks going in the opposite direction, normalizing and further encouraging hunting. The most critical point concerns precisely the underlying message: in a historical moment in which we are discussing the climate crisis, loss of biodiversity and new models of coexistence with animals, expanding hunting is seen as an anachronistic choice.
On the other hand, those who support the measure instead speak of “wildlife management“, arguing that some species – such as wild boars – must be controlled to avoid damage to agriculture and risks to safety. This is where the conflict becomes clearer. Because it does not just concern one law, but two opposing visions: on the one hand hunting as a management and tradition tool, on the other the request to overcome it, in light of new scientific, ethical and environmental knowledge.
At this point, the question becomes inevitable: how is it possible that people still kill for fun in 2026?
Sources: FeDerSerD / LAV
