We’ve all seen fictionalized accounts in movies or on TV in which humans become the
prey for other humans.
It was slightly changed in the movie “Predator” when the hunter was an alien blood sport enthusiast.
You could say the genre kicked off with the short story made into a film called “The
Most Dangerous Game” and that evolved into the dystopian death match thriller “The
Hunger Games.”
What you might not know is that this type of blood lust has happened in the real world
and there are some people that believe we will see it again.
Yep, perhaps one day you might find yourself unwillingly forced to play Fortnite: Reality
Battle Royale.
Before we get into that reality of human hunting in the past let’s first have a look at a
paper written by an English professor called, “Hunting humans: A future for tourism in
2200.”
You are likely thinking this prediction of tourism in the future is implausible, unrealistic,
downright fantastical.
The writer of the paper, however, takes the possibility quite seriously.
He tells us that when you put together the constituents of a perfect storm of natural
resource depletion, environmental damage, natural disasters, widespread poverty and
a number of untouchable global elites, a future pastime for those with all the power might
be to start hunting those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
He writes, “In the year 2200 death and hunting humans will form part of the tourism entertainment
industry and a practice carried out by the wealthy-elite, a view backed with substance.”
He says that we will devolve towards being excited by spectacles of gore and become desensitized
to human atrocities and in this wild world our forms of entertainment will become extreme
beyond what we can imagine now.
But if we look back to the past, humans hunting humans as a spectacle for entertainment is
not that far-fetched.
We are not saying as the academic says in that we will rewind our enlightened and reasoned
minds and once again become attracted to or accepting of gruesome violence, but we might
wonder just how bad we could get if our very world was changed around us and many people
lived in desperate circumstances.
The writer seems to think that with the right (well, wrong) conditions our morality might
dissolve and as we desperately eke out survival we will become less empathetic with other’s
struggles or even begin to enjoy watching others suffer.
Meanwhile, those at the top of the pile seem to enjoy an almost psychopathic form of tourism
entertainment.
What could emerge, says the writer, might be something similar to the horrific blood
sports that happened in the Roman Coliseum.
Crowds might jeer and cheer at the sight of blood just as crowds did during Medieval times
when people were put to death in the worst ways one can imagine.
There are many kinds of human hunting, but throughout history there have been few cases
where it was a blood sport similar to the dystopian fictions we have seen where humans
are chased through the forests like wild animals.
We’ll get around to that soon, but first we should point out that predators have preyed
on humans in many ways.
Premeditated murder is a kind of hunting and something that happens all over the world
on a regular basis.
Lynching mobs still today go out and destroy a person or people, often because they think
the justice system has failed but also sometimes because they hold extreme views.
We’ve seen various kinds of headhunting all over the world, while some serial killers
might take any part of the body as a kind of trophy.
It isn’t common when human hunting has been for kicks, a sick kind of entertainment, and
it’s usually to assert dominance of a tribe or for a serial killer perhaps dominance of
himself over another.
We might also include genocide as a form of human hunting, such as what happened during
the Second World War, in the Spanish Civil War, and many other genocides around the world.
When we look at what happened during the Spanish Civil War we can see that indeed people were
hunted like animals.
During this time one military man told an American journalist, “You know what's wrong
with Spain?
Modern plumbing!
In healthier times — spiritually healthier, you understand — plague and pestilence could
be counted on to thin the Spanish masses ... now, with modern sewage disposal, they simply multiply
too fast.
The masses are no better than animals.”
Some of these people were hunted down and killed during what was called “agrarian
reform”.
This would involve men on horseback literally chasing peasants down and slaughtering them.
The humor, or at least according to the predators, was they buried the peasants on the land they
had been dispossessed of and this was their agrarian reform.
“It was like a deer or wild boar hunt.
The raiders would sweep the mountains so the prey would flee,” said one Spanish historian
about this time.
So humans have hunted humans many times over, but as we said it’s more often than not
been for ideological reasons or for the reason of asserting tribal dominance.
This seems a far cry from the sadism of hunting humans for fun, or sport, which you might
have seen during the Roman Empire days.
But there has been at least one modern case when a killer did just that, and we don’t
mean stalking prey in the streets and then taking their life but actually taking them
to a large unpopulated area and then giving them the chance to run.
He would then, like a hunter of animals, go after them.
This man’s name was Robert Hansen.
He died a few years ago, but what he did won’t easily be forgotten.
He is perhaps the only person to take the fiction of The Most Dangerous Game and turn
it into an awful reality.
Before he progressed to hunting people, Hansen had been a prolific hunter of animals.
You can find photos of him online dressed in the typical hunting outfit that’d you’d
expect to see in the wilds of the USA.
But this man was anything but normal.
Reading his bios you can find writers saying that as a child he was reserved and shy and
a bit of an outcast, so what he did to let off steam was go out into the woods and hunt
animals.
At age 18 he joined the US military and then he got married.
He later split with this wife and spent some time in prison for arson and petty theft.
He then returned to his hometown of Anchorage, Alaska, and opened a bakery with a new wife.
He had two children with her but as we shall see this was far from the typical American
family.
The year was 1967.
Hansen had what seemed like a pleasant family life and the people in the small community
liked the baked goods he sold.
But it wasn’t long until things started to fall apart.
Hansen it’s said had always been a loner, and even with a loving family he could not
get over the fact he was bullied in school and had been rejected by girls he had tried
to approach.
He had a stutter and bad acne and this led to some young people mocking him, while his
dad was said to have not helped at all during this chaotic childhood.
In the early 1970s his family life was not as great as it looked from the outside and
Hansen started getting in trouble again.
He was first convicted of assault and later of theft, which led to him being diagnosed
with bipolar disorder.
It was sometime during the early 70s that he also started abducting women.
Hansen would meet women, often girls working at local strip clubs, and then physically
abuse them.
If he could convince them not to say anything he later said he’d let them go, but if he
thought they would tell he killed them.
It’s thought that he killed 17 people before he was arrested in 1983, but how he sometimes
killed him is what gained him a degree of infamy over other killers.
After abducting some of his victims from town he would fly them in his plane to a remote
cabin he owned.
We are told some of these women, and girls, he would assault and murder but others he
would promise to let go.
That he did, but only as far as saying you are free and letting them run out of the door.
He would then wait a while and begin his hunt armed with a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic
rifle and a hunting knife.
It’s said this hunt could take hours or even days, but he would eventually find them.
Police later would find a map he owned where he had buried some of the bodies.
He was caught after he had abducted and tortured one woman and then told her he was going to
take her out to his cabin.
While he was loading his cockpit this brave, handcuffed woman saw a chance to make a run
for it from the back of his car.
She escaped and while running down the street she was seen and picked up by a truck driver.
He was shocked to see she was wearing hardly any clothes, no shoes and was in handcuffs.
Police had already been investigating missing women in the area and when the woman described
what her captor looked like not only did it look like Hansen but he fit the profile of
who they were looking for.
After arresting him, Hansen eventually took police to 17 grave sites and told them he
had abducted many more women but let a lot of them go.
He was sentenced in 1984 to 461 years plus life in prison without any chance of parole.
The strange thing is, while Hansen was no doubt sadistic, he actually believed he was
doing something good because in his mind he was cleaning up the town of disreputable women.
“In his mind there were good girls and bad girls.
These were all purposefully bad girls,” the assistant district attorney who tried
the case said in an interview.
In 2015, Hansen died in the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
So, these are a few cases of humans hunting humans.
We can’t begin to imagine what the academic we mentioned in the first part of the show
said might happen in the future in that there could be a tourism niche for such a depraved
activity.
We hope such depredations involving the hunting of humans for ideological reasons are well
and truly over, and we hope that sadists like Hansen are a human anomaly and no sane person
would ever want to hunt another human.
But we must ask you if you think this could happen again?
Also, be sure to check out our other show Worst Punishments In The History of Mankind.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.