Basel-Landschaft backpedals: first regulation, now «no objective»

On 11 August 2026, the cantonal government of Basel-Landschaft responded for a second time to Pascal Wolf's fox-hunting petition.

The new statement is in open contradiction to the first response from June and once again evades the central question.

The trigger for the second round was the expert report «Scientific foundations on fox hunting» by the SWILD office, drawn up in the canton of Zug in May 2026. Wolf had forwarded this report to the cantonal government. The response from Liestal now states that the findings presented therein «do not, on essential points, contradict current practice» and are «already being taken into account» in the design of cantonal enforcement.

Two letters, two statements

It is precisely here that things become inconsistent. In its first statement of 16 June 2026, signed by government president Dr Anton Lauber and cantonal clerk Elisabeth Heer Dietrich, the very same cantonal government had expressly described the «regulation of huntable species» as an important measure of wildlife management and characterised hobby hunting as an instrument of this management.

In the second letter of 11 August 2026, signed by government president Thomi Jourdan and the same cantonal clerk Elisabeth Heer Dietrich, it says, by contrast, that fox hunting is «not practised with the aim of area-wide population regulation».

The fact that the two letters were signed by two different heads of government does not exonerate the authority. A cantonal government decision is a collegial decision of the entire government, not the personal opinion of the signatory. In both cases the same authority is speaking, and within two months it says the opposite.

Whoever first declares regulation to be an important management measure and two months later denies it as an objective, as soon as scientific evidence is on the table, cannot at the same time claim that the previous practice had always taken this evidence into account.

The timeline refutes the claim of “already taken into account”

The chronology is most revealing. Pascal Wolf submitted his petition on 16 December 2025 and based it on around a dozen scientific sources. The SWILD report had not even been written at that point; it is dated May 2026 and was produced on behalf of the canton of Zug, not the canton of Basel-Landschaft.

Even in its first response of 16 June 2026, the cantonal government does not mention the report with a single word. This letter cites no scientific source whatsoever. Only in the second letter of 11 August 2026 does the report appear, and expressly as something that newly reached the canton through Wolf's submission.

Kanton Basel-Landschaft antwortet auf Fuchsjagd-Petition – ohne eine einzige wissenschaftliche Quelle

This puts the formula “already taken into account” on shaky ground. A specialist report that the canton did not yet know in June and did not mention in its own statement cannot already have been built into its ongoing practice in August. And had the scientific state of knowledge in fact long been the cantonal standard, nothing would have been more obvious in June than to substantiate exactly that with its own sources. Instead, the first response remained without sources. The claim that these are “no new findings” is only added retrospectively, once the evidence is on the table that the canton itself was unable to provide two months earlier.

The current hunting directive shows no change of course

If a canton declares that scientific findings are “already taken into account in the design of the cantonal implementation”, then this ought to be evident in the implementation. That is precisely where it is not to be found.

The currently applicable directive «Exercising the Hunt in the Hunting Year 2026/27» issued by the cantonal specialist office for Wildlife, Hunting and Fishing is dated 18 March 2026. It governs the period from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027 and stipulates a regular hunting season for the fox from 16 June to the end of February, supplemented by the permitted night-time hunting in the field using artificial light with personal authorisation.

This directive dates from before the SWILD report and before both petition responses. The canton cannot possibly have incorporated findings from a report it only received in the summer into a directive it issued in March. Accordingly, the canton's official hunting page contains no new directive, no adjustment and no instruction that would document any consideration of the Zug findings. Enforcement continues unchanged.

It is also revealing that the same directive expressly regulates the regular fox hunt and the removal of sick or injured animals separately. The pursuit and killing of sick or injured animals of huntable species is permitted therein separately and at any time, subject to a reporting obligation to the specialist office. The canton itself thus distinguishes between individual-case removal and the more than eight-month-long regular hunting season for the fox. In this way its own directive refutes the framing of the August letter, according to which the matter at its core concerns only individual problem animals.

What the Zug report actually shows

The SWILD report provides the scientific core on which the contradiction is ignited. It concludes that the fox hunting currently practised does not regulate the populations sustainably. Medium-sized predators such as the fox compensate for losses through earlier reproduction, higher fertility and immigration, so that population densities remain stable despite high hunting pressure.

Even the experiences from combating rabies showed that intensive hunting and burrow fumigation could not reduce fox populations. Only the medical vaccination campaign from 1978 onwards brought the epidemic under control. A French study on the small fox tapeworm even found that the prevalence in the heavily hunted area rose from 44 to 55 per cent, while it remained unchanged in the control area.

If regular fox hunting does not hold up scientifically as a regulatory instrument, the main justification for widespread hunting falls away. This is precisely what the Government Council had to implicitly concede in its second reply, without drawing the consequence.

Not a marginal practice, but hundreds of animals per year

The canton presents fox hunting as an instrument that primarily concerns individual sick, injured or conspicuous animals. The official figures paint a different picture. According to the federal hunting statistics, in the canton of Basel-Landschaft in the years 2020 to 2024, 455, 521, 437, 511 and most recently 676 foxes were killed each year, together around 2,600 animals over five years.

Regular hunting of an average of over 500 foxes per year cannot be explained by reference to individual case measures. Targeted interventions on actual problem animals do not justify general hobby hunting of several hundred healthy foxes each year.

Geneva and Luxembourg as documented counter-examples

That it can be done differently is no theory. The canton of Geneva abolished hobby hunting as far back as 1974 and has since left interventions exclusively to the wildlife wardens. The comparison in the Zug report shows that in Geneva, across the entire time series, significantly fewer foxes are killed both in absolute terms and per square kilometre than in comparable licence-hunting cantons, without the fox populations getting out of control.

In Luxembourg, fox hunting has been banned since 2015. The responsible nature administration states that the ban has not led to an increase in problems with foxes and that bird protectionists observed no additional problems for ground-nesting birds. The proportion of foxes infected with the fox tapeworm has even declined since the ban.

Forgoing regular hobby hunting does not mean an inability to act. Sick, injured or problematic animals can still be selectively removed. This is precisely what Wolf's question is aimed at.

The one question that remains open

In his reply of 11 August 2026, Pascal Wolf poses to the Government Council a single, precise question: What scientifically documented purpose still justifies the regular hunting of several hundred foxes per year in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, if population regulation does not hold up scientifically for this and concrete problem animals can also be selectively removed?

The claim that the findings are «already being taken into account» does not answer this question. It shifts it. And it does not withstand its own chronology, because only what is known can be taken into account, and the canton demonstrably only knew of the report after Wolf presented it to them. As long as the cantons are not obliged to justify hunting interventions scientifically, the burden of proof remains where it does not belong: with those who ask questions, rather than with those who have hundreds of animals killed every year.

The Basel-Landschaft case thus fits a familiar pattern. What the canton of Zug had drawn up externally with the SWILD report, and what Geneva and Luxembourg have long demonstrated in practice, is noted in Liestal but not translated into action.

Quicklinks

• Canton of Basel-Landschaft responds to fox-hunting petition without a single scientific source
• Basel-Stadt is considering ending fox hunting, prompted by a Zug report
• Campaign: An end to fox hunting
• Abolition of hobby hunting following the model of the canton of Geneva
• Studies on the impact of hunting on wild animals

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Sources

• Cantonal Government of Basel-Landschaft, statement on the petition for a review of the scientific necessity of fox hunting, 16 June 2026
• Cantonal Government of Basel-Landschaft, second statement on the petition for a review of the scientific necessity of fox hunting, 11 August 2026
• SWILD, Scientific foundations of fox hunting, expert report commissioned by the Office for Forest and Wildlife of the canton of Zug, May 2026
• Federal hunting statistics, red fox, kills in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, 2015 to 2024, jagdstatistik.ch
• Office for Forest and Wildlife of both Basel, Wildlife, Hunting and Fisheries Unit, Exercise of hunting in the hunting year 2026/27 in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, directive of 18 March 2026
• Comte et al. (2017), Echinococcus multilocularis management by fox culling: An inappropriate paradigm, Preventive Veterinary Medicine 147
• Nature Administration of Luxembourg, Technical report on wildlife management and hunting, numbers 4 (2016), 8 and 10 (2024)