Are we all programmed to kill?

In the past couple of years the world has seen more and more examples of people taking it upon themselves to eradicate their own race, not on a global scale like the attempt made by Adolf Hitler, however, men like Anders Behring Breivic managing to single-handedly kill 77 people and injure 242 makes the world a very frightening place to live in.

A couple of weeks ago I read an article in a tabloid newspaper about a man who lives with a tiger. This man had raised and lived with the tiger since it was a cub, he slept with the animal cuddled it and petted it like it was a domesticated cat. The question asked by most of the people commenting on the article was; what happens when the tiger turns on this man? When the tiger decides it’s too hungry to sit by when this tasty piece of meat is sat next to it.

This prompted me to react in a way I didn’t expect, I thought to myself, why is the tiger considered in any way different to a human being? A tiger’s base instinct is to fight for food, however, it has been proved by some men that they can be tamed. So, if a human being who had been friends with a woman his entire life, a woman which he had married and made a family with suddenly broke down and killed his entire family does that make him any different to the tiger? In my opinion the answer to that question is no, a human being is just as capable of killing one of his own kind as a tiger and a human being is just as capable of killing animals lower in the food chain than itself as a tiger also does. The base instinct always being the creatures own survival, whether human or wild animal.

What then triggers the mind of a human being to kill his fellows? Why does a man one day decide to kill? Is it an individual instinct or is it an instinct that is programmed into us all? I myself have never felt the urge to kill another man, does that mean that I never would? I would like to think so. I wonder how many people on a daily basis have the urge to truly kill someone else but suppress it without even realising.

Is not killing someone purely down to will power? It frightens me to think that the decision to kill another person could be on the same level as smoking a cigarette when you’re trying to quit. When someone with high willpower gets the urge to kill someone else do they simply brush off the notion as foolish, whereas people with extremely low willpower ignore their better judgement and take another persons life.

Who knows what truly goes on in the mind of a killer? But if it all comes down to will power, I hope nobody judges me on the fact that I don’t go to the gym anywhere near as often as I should.

Maybe I should just move to a zoo and befriend a tiger, at least then I would know where I stood.

Matt.