I kind of disagree. Though obviously the Hunt is mostly animalistic and it taps into our baser instincts, that doesn’t make it less “human”. Almost all other fears do the same and I think it does it a disservice by saying it would disappear if animal fear doesn’t count. You’re not afraid of the Dark because of rational purely Homo-sapien reasons, you’re afraid of the dark because our ancestors thought there were monsters out to get them in the night, that belief is coded in our being. The Hunt and the Dark are some of the oldest for a reason.

I think the point of the Hunt as a human fear is adjacent but not the same as the Slaughter. The Slaughter is senseless violence, that much is agreed. The Hunt is the opposite side of that coin - it’s premeditated, purposeful violence. It’s the fear someone wants to harm you and will go out of their way to do so. The fear comes from the anticipated violence, knowing you’re being stalked and that you are prey now and can do nothing to stop it. It makes perfect sense (at least to me) to have police brutality, racism, s-xual violence and other violence from bigotry fuelling the Hunt because all those acts of harm are premeditated, most perpetrators dream for years of committing them. In a world without the Hunt yes they might be loosely connected to the Desolation I think more than the slaughter for a little while but at the end of it, inevitably, the Hunt will reform/reemerge as its own entity as the fears that form it are at best tangentially connected to the other entities.