PETA Calls for End to Hunting and Fishing Fairs
This weekend, the 'Hunt & Fish 2025' fair is taking place in the Leipzig agra fairgrounds. PETA sharply condemns the event: under the guise of tradition and leisure fun, the most brutal animal cruelty is trivialized and even promoted.
In Germany alone, recreational hunters kill over five million wild animals annually and an estimated additional 200,000 cats—not out of necessity, but for the pleasure of killing.
Anglers inflict hook injuries, suffering, and slow suffocation on millions of fish year after year. Animals that feel, suffer, and have a right to bodily integrity are sacrificed for a bloody 'hobby.'
Recreational hunting is neither ecologically necessary nor ethically defensible; it is nothing more than organized animal cruelty, says Peter Höffken of PETA. The fact that dogs and birds of prey are also misused as living props at this fair and subjected to the stress of exhibitions shows how callous the industry operates.
Independent wildlife biologists confirm: nature regulates animal populations on its own, through weather, disease, and food availability. Recreational hunting, by contrast, destroys social structures, causes additional suffering, and even accelerates the reproduction of wild animals.
Fish too are sentient beings with complex social lives that experience pain. International studies show: they recognize themselves in mirrors, form friendships, and are capable of remarkable cognitive feats. Yet they continue to be systematically tortured and killed.
PETA demands: Stop trivializing animal suffering at fairs like 'Hunt & Fish.' End recreational hunting and fishing in Germany. Anyone who respects animals stays away from the event, warns PETA's press release.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. 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.
