Fribourg: 70 Firearms Seized from Gang of Recreational Hunters
The public prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into violations of hunting legislation and the Federal Weapons Act.
At the beginning of August, the cantonal police, in cooperation with the Office for Forests and Nature, intervened in Remaufens in the canton of Fribourg due to suspected poaching.
On the same night, two alleged recreational hunters were apprehended.
Poaching and House Searches
On Tuesday, August 6, 2019, at around 10:45 PM, police intervention was requested after two individuals shot a roe deer near a forest in Remaufens and then fled into the woods. The search conducted that same night led to the apprehension of the two alleged poachers at their respective places of residence.
On orders from the on-call public prosecutor, officers — assisted by game wardens — carried out several house searches at various residences in the Vivisbach district. These measures led to the discovery and seizure of approximately seventy firearms of all kinds (carbines, rifles, pistols).
Illegal Weapon Modifications and Accessories
Around twenty of these weapons, seized primarily from one recreational hunter, showed modifications prohibited under legislation. Several prohibited components (silencers, night-vision scopes) compatible with these weapons were also discovered and seized during the house searches.
The alleged poachers — two Swiss nationals aged 30 and 44 — hold valid hunting licenses and reside in the Vivisbach district. They were temporarily detained and questioned before being released following the police measures.
The roe deer in question was retrieved by game wardens with the help of a dog specially trained to search for injured wildlife trained dog found dead in the forest. The investigation carried out to this day has made it possible to identify three additional persons.
They are two Swiss nationals and one citizen from Kosovo, aged 21, 74, and 56, who also reside in the Vivisbach district. The five aforementioned persons have been reported to the competent authority.
Apparently, these recreational hunters are neither well trained nor do they possess sound moral integrity.
Particularly when it comes to hunting and recreational hunters, it is essential that the public watches very closely. Nowhere else is there so much manipulation through falsehoods and fake news.Violence and lies are two sides of the same coin. For decades, recreational hunting has been nothing other than a permanently costly construction site, a patchwork, and a source of contention for politics, forestry and agriculture, public administrations, the justice system, health insurers, insurance companies, animal welfare, environmental and nature conservation organizations, the police, the federal government, the media, and so on.
Any other organization with so much criminal energy would have long since been targeted by the federal prosecutor's office!
Current criminal offenses by recreational hunters in Switzerland are listed here: Link
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
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.
