4’616 red deer: what the Grisons hunting plan reveals — and what it does not prove

The canton of Grisons plans to kill 4’616 red deer in 2026.

Among them are 2’514 female animals. The estimated spring population is given as 13’485 red deer, following 13’585 the previous year. The figures are public: the Office for Hunting and Fishing publishes its planning, its population assumptions and the legal basis for hunting.

But a published kill figure does not in itself prove that killing 4’616 wild animals is ecologically necessary, effective or ethically defensible. Behind the sober number lies a system of high hunt, special hunt, kill quotas and state-organised hobby hunting. This system turns sentient animals into “pieces”, mother animals and calves into “categories”, and a practice of violence into a question of meeting targets.

A critical examination of the cantonal planning, the hunting regulations and the hunting results shows that the Grisons hunting administration discloses a great deal. What is missing is independent proof that this particular form of hunting actually achieves the claimed objectives and that there are no alternatives more compatible with the welfare of wild animals.

The special hunt is no mere slip-up

The Grisons high hunt takes place in September. Afterwards, the responsible department decides on the basis of the high hunt bag whether and where a special hunt is ordered. For 2026 it is possible, depending on the region, between 31 October and 20 December; a maximum of ten half hunting days is envisaged per area.

Legally, then, the special hunt is a second hunting phase that must be ordered separately. It does not take place automatically. Politically and organisationally, however, it is not some alien state of emergency but a firmly established instrument of the Grisons hunting system. The question is therefore not whether the canton publishes its legal basis. It does. The question is: why is the regular high hunt so often insufficient to achieve the targets set by the authority itself?

The 2023 hunting year shows just how significant this second phase can be. The cantonal kill quota provided for 5’278 red deer. For what is termed qualitative fulfilment of the plan, at least 3’050 female deer were to be killed. After the end of the high hunt, the canton declared that a further 2’218 female deer and their calves would have to be killed during the special hunt in order for the hunting mandate to be fulfilled.

In the end, according to the detailed cantonal analysis, 4’928 red deer were bagged. Quantitative target fulfilment stood at 93.4 per cent. Of the 3’050 female animals foreseen, 2’463 were killed. Qualitative target fulfilment, which is particularly relevant for regulation, thus stood at 80.8 per cent. The cantonal media release cited an almost identical overall result of 4’909 deer.

This does not prove that the special hunt is imperative every year. It does show, however, that the second hunting phase plays a considerable role as soon as the high hunt fails to deliver the desired number of female animals. The canton describes it as an instrument of regulation. From an animal welfare perspective, a different question arises: why is it not first examined in earnest whether hunting periods, refuge areas, a reduction of disturbance or the organisation of the high hunt could be altered in such a way that the later hunting of female deer and calves becomes superfluous?

The «high population» needs context

The cantonal planning estimates the spring 2026 population at 13,485 red deer. Compared with the previous year, that is a decline of 100 animals. The canton places the current figure within its «Habitat Forest-Wildlife» strategy and assesses it as part of a population reduction pursued since 2020.

But population figures are not direct head counts. They are based on assessments, hunting bags, animals found dead, regional observations and calculated assumptions. They are important for planning, but they do not possess the precision that political debates often suggest. An estimate of 13,485 animals does not mean that exactly 13,485 red deer live in the canton and that the killing of precisely 4,616 animals necessarily follows from it.

The historical development also argues against simple alarmist rhetoric. The red deer population in Grisons has never developed in a linear fashion. The FOEN time series shows phases of increase and decline over decades: from just under 10,000 animals at the end of the 1960s to around 15,000 animals in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then significantly lower again, and later back up to a high of around 16,600 animals in the years 2017 to 2019. Since then the population has declined according to cantonal estimates.

The current figure is thus well below the most recent peak and within a range of fluctuation that is visible over the long term. It does not follow from this that there can be no local problems. But the claim of an extraordinary «overpopulation» that must necessarily be solved by hobby hunting is not substantiated by a single overall figure.

This becomes even clearer when looking at the hunting bag. Whereas in the 1930s and 1940s usually only a few hundred red deer were killed per year, today the kills regularly amount to several thousand animals. Around 2018 they reached some 6,500 animals. However, the rising hunting bag does not automatically prove a correspondingly rising population. What it shows first and foremost is how drastically the state-organised removal has been expanded in a manner that is cruel to animals.

Hunting is not a neutral regulator

The hunting authority treats hobby hunting as a means of population regulation. The FOEN implementation guidelines likewise describe the regulation of red deer via several criteria: sex ratio, proportion of young animals and a removal that, depending on the objective, must exceed the annual increment.

Yet a kill figure is not the same thing as a straightforward reduction in numbers. Wildlife populations respond to heavy intervention. When fewer animals compete for food, the survivors may gain better access to forage, come through the winter in better physical condition, and reproduce earlier or more successfully. Such compensatory responses are well documented in population biology.

That does not mean that every kill is without effect, or that hunting inevitably leads to rising populations. How pronounced such effects are depends on density, age structure, sex ratio, food availability, climate, habitat, migration and predators. For Grisons, this question can only be answered with regional long-term data.

That is precisely why it is problematic when hunting uses its own kill figures to confirm itself as a successful regulatory authority. A high bag does not prove that a problem has been solved. What it proves, first and foremost, is that a great many animals were killed. What would matter are independent answers to other questions: Is browsing damage declining in the woodland areas that are actually affected? Are game densities and spatial use changing? What role does hunting disturbance play? And what share is attributable to winter, habitat and predators?

Wolf and lynx are part of the picture

The canton itself acknowledges that predators are part of population dynamics. The hunting operation regulations state that in regions with wolf packs, calves are frequently taken by wolves in their first weeks and months. In the Surselva, Mittelbünden and Heinzenberg regions, the female share of the kill quota was therefore reduced from 60 to 50 per cent.

That is more than a technical adjustment. It shows that hunting is not the only force influencing the number and structure of a red deer population. Wolves and lynx alter calf mortality, spatial use and the behaviour of ungulates. Winter losses, food, habitat quality and migratory movements also have an effect.

The decline in the red deer population since the most recent peak can therefore not be attributed to a single cause. Hunting can influence it. Predators can influence it. Winter mortality, habitat and cantonal planning are all at work at the same time. It is therefore misleading when hobby hunting books falling population figures solely as its own regulatory success.

It is precisely the presence of wolf and lynx that calls into question the old hunting narrative according to which humans, as armed recreational shooters, are indispensable for creating «the balance». Predators are not a disturbance of a supposedly natural hunting system. They are part of functioning ecosystems – and they fulfil their role without trophies, licences and kill quotas.

The mislabelling of the «forest pest»

In order to justify high numbers of kills, the red deer is often declared a forest pest. It is said to hinder the regeneration of protection forests, cause browsing damage and thereby endanger safety and infrastructure. This narrative sounds simple. The ecological reality is not.

Forest–wildlife conflicts do not arise from the number of animals alone. Forest structure, tree species, food availability, areas of rest and retreat, tourist use, forestry work, traffic, feeding, predators and the intensity of hobby hunting are all decisive as well. Anyone who reduces browsing damage solely to a supposedly excessive number of red deer is ignoring these factors.

Hobby hunting can itself drive wild animals into problematic areas. Research shows that red deer respond to hunting pressure with flight, heightened vigilance and altered activity patterns. They shift into less disturbed areas, use dense cover and become more nocturnal. It is therefore plausible that hobby hunting influences where and when red deer feed – possibly in precisely those areas of forest whose browsing damage later serves as an argument for further kills.

That does not mean hobby hunting alone causes browsing damage. But it is part of the problem it claims to solve. Anyone who wants to protect the protection forest must take disturbance, habitat quality and the animals' spatial use just as seriously as kill quotas. A policy that first creates disturbance and then uses the animals' reaction as justification for killing them is not a neutral wildlife policy.

When animals become berries

Just how fragile the claim of an ecologically necessary «regulation» is becomes clear in the case of low hunting. It affects species such as the brown hare, fox, badger, marten, black grouse, ptarmigan, wood pigeon, crow, magpie, cormorant, mallard and other animals. The Grisons hunting regulations thus release for shooting not only ungulates, in whose case hobby hunting at least rhetorically invokes forest or population targets.

The former president of the Grisons licence hunters' association, Robert Brunold, summed up the attitude in 2015 in an interview with SRF. Low hunting was not necessary, he said, but it was justified. One could just as well ask whether it made sense to gather berries and mushrooms in the forest. With low hunting, one was making use of a «natural product».

This comparison reveals more than it is meant to conceal. Berries and mushrooms feel no fear. They do not flee from humans, they are not shot at, they do not bleed to death, they do not care for young and they do not live in social relationships. A fox is not a forest fruit. A brown hare is not a store of provisions. A black grouse is not a «product» that needs to be managed.

Brunold was speaking explicitly about a form of hobby hunting that he himself did not describe as necessary. This removes the protective claim of regulation. What remains is a practice in which animals are killed because people claim killing as tradition, as a leisure activity or as a permitted form of appropriation.

This is precisely where the core of hobby hunting becomes visible. It is not merely a technical measure for forest protection. It is a culturally and politically protected practice of violence that declares animals to be available prey. Low hunting thus exposes the regulation narrative: where no necessity is claimed, all that remains is the pleasure of holding power over life and death.

Animal suffering by design

The language of hunt planning is matter-of-fact: «kill quota», «release», «categories», «bag», «qualitative target fulfilment». It makes what these words actually mean disappear: animals are chased, terrified, separated from one another, shot at, killed or left behind wounded.

During the 2022 high hunt, just under 9’200 red deer, chamois, roe deer and wild boars were shot in Grisons. Around 790 of them – almost every tenth kill – involved animals that were not huntable under the applicable hunting regulations. A wildlife biologist from the Office for Hunting and Fisheries told SRF that this proportion was «more or less the same every year».

Not every non-huntable animal killed amounts to a deliberate offence. But the figure points to a structural problem. Nor does it capture the full dimension of animal suffering. Wounding shots, follow-up searches and animals that escape injured and are never found must be distinguished from it. A form of hobby hunting in which, according to the authorities' own figures, roughly every tenth kill regularly involves a non-huntable animal cannot credibly present itself as a precise, controlled and «ethical» practice.

On the special hunt, the ethical question becomes more acute. There, hobby hunting is additionally directed, region by region and category by category, at female red deer and calves. These clearances go beyond the categories that apply during the high hunt. The system increases the pressure precisely when the official kill quota has not been met.

From an animal welfare perspective this is particularly problematic: legal clearance does not prevent mother animals and the calves dependent on them from being affected. It also takes place at a time of year when wild animals have to conserve energy and prepare for winter. While hobby hunting invokes «ethical hunting practice» in autumn, it extends its interventions as soon as the quota does not add up.

The FOEN statistics additionally list «special kills» for Grisons. In several years, particularly between 2007 and 2020, these involved not only stags but also hinds and calves. The statistics do not cover the entire special hunt. But they do show that additional interventions repeatedly hit precisely those groups of animals that are decisive for offspring, social organisation and reproduction in a red deer population.

Why pleasure in killing is no harmless leisure motive

People who take pleasure in killing living creatures and pay for the privilege are not, from a psychological point of view, displaying normal leisure behaviour. This behaviour contradicts fundamental mechanisms of empathy, compassion and moral inhibition as they exist in the great majority of mentally healthy people. Psychologically, it constitutes deviant violent behaviour, even if it is politically or culturally tolerated.

Pleasure in killing is a classic hallmark of pleasure-based violence. The act of violence itself is rewarding: not the outcome, not some claimed necessity, but the killing. This is not a marginal phenomenon; it is clearly described in the psychology of violence.

Not everyone who hunts will experience the act of killing in the same way or openly describe it as pleasure. But anyone who experiences hobby hunting precisely as the pleasure of killing, as adrenaline, triumph or personal gratification, displays a psychologically problematic motivation towards violence. Historically and structurally, this stands close to authoritarian and dehumanising patterns of thought, because it turns the killed creature into a means of one's own gratification.

Conclusion

The figure of 4,616 is no secret. Grisons publishes it, justifies it with its own population estimates and situates it within its forest-wildlife strategy. That is better than a policy conducted behind closed doors. But transparency about the figure is not the same as proof of its necessity.

An officially published kill quota plan shows how many animals the canton wants to have killed. It does not automatically prove that these killings are the mildest, most effective or ethically defensible answer to questions of forest and wildlife. Nor does it prove that the second hunting phase is indispensable, that hunting disturbance does not contribute to browsing damage, or that hobby hunting adequately takes into account its own influence on population dynamics and spatial use.

The real scandal does not lie in a single figure. It lies in the political normalisation of a system that turns thousands of sentient wild animals into planning entries every year. The special hunt has to be ordered separately in legal terms, but it is firmly embedded in the hunting system as a second instrument. The low hunt also shows that hobby hunting is not only about claimed regulation, but also about the socially sanctioned killing of animals that even its own representatives describe as unnecessary.

As long as the hunting authority measures itself above all by kill quotas and no independent, comprehensive assessment of hunting disturbance, forest impact, mistaken kills, wounding shots, follow-up searches and animal suffering is available, the 4,616 remains for us the bookkeeping of a sectarian ritual.