Recreational hunter shoots pets into cat heaven
A Berlin recreational hunter boasted on Facebook about shooting cats. The provocative post proved to be his undoing.
Bernd Green Recreational Hunter Shoots Pets to Cat Heaven
«She Had a Name»
Bernd Green from near Berlin is a recreational hunter, and he apparently takes great pleasure in shooting cats — or so suggests a provocative Facebook post that has now backfired badly on the serial killer.
In the post, Bernd Green had boasted about having already killed 28 cats this year alone, on the grounds that, in his opinion, these animals simply have no place in the local natural environment.
The passionate recreational hunter had posted this as a comment beneath a post on the page “Bürgerinitiative Pro Fuchs Hessen”. In the middle of the month, the page had been the scene of heated debate on the topic of free-roaming cats.
Now Bernd Green’s employer, the «Tropical Islands», a leisure pool in Brandenburg where he is said to have worked as a gardener, caught wind of the tasteless comment — and reacted promptly: the employee has been suspended until further notice..
Prior to this, Bernd Green had repeatedly attracted negative attention on social media. On a Pro Fuchs page, he publicly insulted animal welfare activists as “Fuchs-Nazis”, among other things. The recreational hunter now appears to have deleted his social media profiles. The tasteless comment can no longer be found on the “Bürgerinitiative Pro Fuchs Hessen” page either.
Bernd Green: Recreational hunters stand by their comrade
Online, the Facebook comment and its consequences have since caused quite a stir — not only among animal welfare advocates, but also within the hunting community.
In the forum of the hunting magazine ‘Wild und Hund’, for example, there is unanimous agreement that the recreational hunter made no mistake and that his actions are moreover expressly protected under hunting law in the state of Brandenburg. For next time, however, the suspended employee is advised to show greater restraint.
Free-roaming cats: Can hunters really shoot them?
Hunting law in Germany is not uniformly regulated and depends on the legislation of the individual federal state in which a hunter practices. In Bavaria, hunters are permitted to shoot cats found in the wild more than 300 metres from the nearest house. In Brandenburg, the distance is only 200 metres. The shooting of free-roaming cats is entirely prohibited in Saarland and North Rhine-Westphalia.
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. 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.
