200 recreational hunters parade through the city centre of Baden with hunting horns

More than a dozen groups take turns performing their pieces at three locations in Baden's city centre.

Editorial Wild beim Wild · 15 May 2025

On 17 May in the canton of Aargau, in the city of Baden, primitive and unfamiliar sounds are set to ring out as part of the 1st Aargau Hunting Horn Blowers' Meeting.

Meanwhile, on the same day in Basel, the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 takes place — a vision of peace through music.

Around 200 recreational hunters are set to play at various locations in Baden's city centre, before the ghost parade concludes with a collective cacophony at Bahnhofplatz. With such events, organisers hope to attract according to a statement new recruits to the sectarian and violence-prone hunting associations.

The art of hunting is often compared to the art of war, with today's recreational hunter typically playing the role of a tyrant — lazy, cowardly, and heavily equipped with technology, perched in a high seat or concealed in cover. Yet the recreational hunter purportedly yearns for nature. But what kind of surreal nature has the recreational hunter created? It is not closeness to nature, but rather distance and hostility that the recreational hunter embodies and cultivates. These are the character and essence of hunting in the 21st century.

Volksverblödung im Kanton Aargau

As with military signal trumpets, the hunting horn is predominantly a variant of the natural trumpet with a very limited tonal range, serving as war music for recreational hunters.

There are directional signals such as ‘Cock at rest, loud drive, silent drive’ etc., and death signals such as ‘Fox dead, stag dead, hare dead, boar dead’ etc.

Game meat is a filler of very low frequency and not a food. In Canada, it is generally prohibited to sell game meat from recreational hunters in restaurants or stores, because it is considered more of a poison than a food. Many authorities warn against game meat. Accordingly, it also shapes the consciousness of those who consume it, and becomes visible in their activities and behaviors. Recreational hunters live off meat. That is why they are violent and aggressive. This is not strange, but entirely natural. When one lives off killing, one has no respect for life. One is hostile toward life. That is why most animal species are shot for fun by recreational hunters, even though scientific studies show there is no meaningful justification for doing so.

Recreational hunters spread unspeakable suffering, terror and misery among both humans and wildlife. Practically everything that is cruel, unnecessary and heartless is promoted by hunting associations, as a court in Bellinzona recently a court in Bellinzona confirmed. In the canton of Aargau, it is particularly the cruel driven hunts. Wildlife suffers because of recreational hunters.Wildlife Recreational hunters not infrequently also turn their weapons on people as well.

According to studies, recreational hunters even promote and spread diseases.

Recreational hunters struggle when they have to explain themselves in an enlightened society. They are insufficiently or not at all properly trained. And so most hunting license holders waddle through nature with the following attitudes:

Vermin must be killed
Wildlife is fruit that merely waits to be harvested
Ecology means: poisoning the soil, groundwater and wildlife with ammunition
making as much noise as possible in the forest
Fur is fashion
Meat consumption is healthy and innate to humans
Hunting and animal cruelty are animal protection
Alcohol and other drugs are part of the fun with a rifle
Hunters' tall tales are science
Hunting is a deep meditation
Killing is a commandment of Moses
Recreational hunters are the advocates for wildlife
Hunting horn sounds are mystical music
etc.

Whoever obtains a hunting license thus always receives two things: a license to kill and a license to become stupefied.

„Fair chase" also has nothing to do with animal protection. The concept of fair chase among recreational hunters stands in direct contradiction to animal welfare legislation. Fair chase is about as far removed from animal welfare law as a cow is from riding a bicycle. Today's recreational hunting is, at its core, simply criminal. Our legal system has simply not yet advanced to the point of reflecting this in criminal law.

Hunting horn events and Hubertus masses, which are primarily co-organized and attended by recreational hunters, are incompatible with the Christian ethic of respect for life. They frequently serve as a prelude to the particularly cruel driven and special hunts, in which recreational hunters move through forests in a manner that constitutes animal cruelty, chasing, injuring, and killing countless wild animals. From a historical perspective, hunting for population control is also not hunting at all, but rather terrorist zoocide.

According to the Veterinary Association for Animal Welfare, up to two thirds of wild animals do not die immediately during driven hunts. With shattered bones and exposed entrails, the animals flee, often suffering from their injuries for days, and die in agony if they are not found during the so-called follow-up search.

Recreational hunters embody speciesism. Speciesism is comparable to racism and sexism, and that is not a culture or tradition.

The event in Baden is contested by groups from Aargau affiliated with the Bläsercorps of Jagd Aargau: including Distellaub Aarau, Freiwild Wiggertal, the Fricktaler Jagdhornbläser, the Jagdhornbläser Hallwyl, the Jagdhornbläser SonatES, and the Zurzibieter Jagdhornbläser. The Aargau groups are joined by guest groups JHB Buechholz, the Jagdhornbläser Ergolz from the Basel region, the Fricker Füchse, and the Jagdhornbläser Edelweiss from Glarus. An international dimension is added to the gathering by the Fürstliche Jagdhornbläsergruppe Liechtenstein and the Jagdhornbläsergruppe Tiengen from the neighboring German region.

Added value:

More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier The Role and Criticism of Recreational Hunters we shed light on the training, power and self-image of recreational hunters. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.

The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.