Shotgun pellet in the garden: trial against hobby hunter after driven hunt accident

During a driven hunt in the district of Cloppenburg a woman is struck by a shotgun pellet in her own garden and seriously injured.

A year and a half later the 73-year-old hobby hunter stands trial. A case that shows what happens when shots are fired in a shared space.

In Barssel, Lower Saxony, a municipality in the district of Cloppenburg, on 7 December 2024 a shotgun pellet strikes a 59-year-old woman on her own property. She is hit below her left eye, seriously injured and taken to hospital. After a complex operation she is, according to the court, unable to work and still suffers from the after-effects to this day.

A year and a half later, since 1 August 2026, the alleged hunting accident is being examined before the Cloppenburg district court. The accused is a 73-year-old hobby hunter. The charge: negligent bodily harm. As a participant in a driven hunt, he is said to have failed to ensure adequately, before firing, that no one was endangered.

Penalty order, objection, hearing

The Oldenburg public prosecutor had applied for a penalty order, which the district court issued: six months' imprisonment suspended, a three-year probationary period, plus a payment of 8’000 euros. The hobby hunter lodged an objection against this penalty order. That is why a public hearing is taking place at all. Ten witnesses were summoned for the opening, including the shooting victim herself. When a verdict will be reached remains open.

A detail worth noting, which reveals much about how the media handles such cases: the original reporting refers alternately to a «bullet» and a «shot pellet». In fact, driven hunts targeting small game use shot, that is, a charge of many small lead pellets that fan out after the shot. It is precisely this scattering that makes the driven hunt so unpredictable in populated areas: a single pellet from the spread is enough to seriously injure a person in their own garden.

Why this is not a peculiarly German problem

Switzerland is affected by the same fundamental danger. Hunting accidents in Switzerland are not a marginal phenomenon but a structural risk that arises from a simple fact: hobby hunting means firearms in public spaces. Hiking trails, forest roads, gardens and the edges of settlements are part of everyday life, and that is where the shooting happens.

This becomes particularly clear in the case of the driven hunt. Driven hunts and drive hunts are considered the most accident-prone form of hunting of all. Several shooters fire simultaneously at fleeing, fast-moving targets, often in poor visibility, under time pressure and group expectation. Ricochets, misidentifications and deflected shots are not rare exceptions but inherent side effects of the system. In its report on grazing shots and follow-up searches, the Swiss animal welfare organisation identified precisely this combination, shooting at moving targets, a lack of shooting practice, stress and group pressure, as the cause of an increased error rate.

That uninvolved persons are also hit is documented. At the end of November 2024, just a few days before the incident in Barssel, a 64-year-old hobby hunter in Oulens-sous-Echallens in the canton of Vaud was fatally struck by a shot fired by a colleague, when a group was trying to drive wild boars out of a thicket. In Carinthia, in October 2025, a 16-year-old beater was hit by shot to the upper body.

A high-risk group by design

The Barssel case fits into a larger picture. From the perspective of IG Wild beim Wild, hobby hunters are a structural high-risk group, and in two respects.

Firstly through negligence, as in the Barssel case: the careless shot, the failure to make sure, the underestimated field of fire. The statistics on fatal hunting accidents shows that the number of accidents rises sharply from middle age onwards. The largest age group among hobby hunters today is 65 plus, the very group in which declining eyesight, slowed reaction times and lapses in concentration statistically increase. The defendant in Barssel is 73.

Secondly, through deliberate violence. As recently as July 2026, the case of Faido and Leontica in Ticino showed just how deadly the combination of access to weapons, hunting routine and personal crisis can become: a 59-year-old hobby hunter shot his ex-wife dead and then blew up a house, injuring several police officers in the process. A femicide is not a hunting accident; these are two different dimensions of risk. But they share the same starting point: the normality of lethal firearms in private leisure hands, largely removed from any continuous control.

That is precisely the crux of the matter. Whether negligence or intent, whether a stray pellet in the garden or a targeted shot: wherever people operate lethal weapons out of the pleasure of killing in a densely used landscape, uninvolved bystanders inevitably end up in the line of fire. This is not the regrettable isolated incident it is regularly presented as, but the foreseeable outcome of a system.

What is needed

In the view of IG Wild beim Wild, hobby hunters require annual medical-psychological fitness assessments modelled on the Netherlands, as well as a binding upper age limit. The endangerment of uninvolved third parties, whether a neighbour in the garden, a walker on the forest path or a beater in the line, disappears from every official statistic, because an independent obligation to report hunting injuries exists neither at federal nor at cantonal level. Professional, strictly controlled wildlife wardens could reduce safety risks and improve the protection of both humans and non-human animals at the same time.

As long as hobby hunting continues in its present form, the sobering conclusion remains the same. In Barssel it is currently being tried in court.

More on the subject of hobby hunting: In our dossier on hunting we bring together fact checks, analyses and background reports. How hobby hunters endanger people, what unrecorded numbers exist and why independent wildlife wardens would be the better solution is shown in our statistics on fatal hunting accidents.