Destroyed Hunting Stands in the Valsugana

The narrative was established immediately: radical animal rights activists, a few fanatics harassing the upstanding hobby hunters.

The hunting associations condemn the acts as cowardly violence, present themselves as open to dialogue, and point the finger outward.

What most reports leave out: recreational hunting is itself a system of organised violence and hostility, and the hunting milieu has been a field of conflict for decades. Exactly who destroyed the hunting stands in the Valsugana remains unknown. What is certain is that reality is more complex than the comfortable image of the good hobby hunters and the evil saboteurs.

What happened in the Valsugana

The Valsugana stretches between Trento and Bassano del Grappa through forests, meadows, and small villages. It is simultaneously a tourist region, a hiking area, and a hunting ground.

According to Südtirol News, in a single night:

• six hunting stands were severed at their supports
• the structures were toppled and rendered unusable
• insults and abbreviations referencing the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) were sprayed on wood and metal

Matteo Renzi, president of the Trentino hunters' association, speaks of reprehensible acts and a small radical minority resorting to violence, while hobby hunters allegedly seek dialogue. The roles are distributed in the classic fashion: on one side the reasonable hobby hunters, on the other the extremist animal rights activists.

Yet this picture falls short. It systematically obscures what form of violence emanates from the hunting stands themselves and how selectively guilt is handled within the hunting milieu.

Who or what is the Animal Liberation Front?

The Animal Liberation Front is not a classic organization with formal statutes, but a loose network of small groups.

• The ALF emerged from the British Hunt Saboteurs Association, which had been disrupting fox hunts since the 1960s.
• The goal is the liberation of animals from laboratories, factory farms, fur farms, and other forms of exploitation.
• Typical methods include property destruction, arson, sawing down hunting stands, and destroying facilities associated with animal exploitation.

In Germany, more than a hundred actions attributed to the ALF were documented between 2009 and 2014, including attacks on slaughterhouses, fur shops, and hunting facilities. Similar patterns exist in Italy, where the ALF has in the past claimed responsibility for attacks on a slaughterhouse near Siena.

The fact that media and authorities in the Valsugana immediately draw a connection to the ALF is therefore not unfounded. But it is only part of the truth.

Hunting stands as targets: A Europe-wide trend

The attack in the Valsugana does not stand in isolation. In several European countries, acts of sabotage against hunting facilities have been increasing for a number of years.

• In Saxony and other federal states, hunting associations report sawn-down hunting stands, some accompanied by letters of responsibility or graffiti attributed to the ALF.
• In Switzerland, for example, two hunting stands were destroyed in Möhlin in the canton of Aargau over the 2023/24 holidays, with the abbreviation ALF prominently displayed on the remains on multiple occasions, as reported by the Aargauer Zeitung.
• The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service explicitly lists animal rights extremism as a form of extremism in its situation reports and refers to acts of sabotage against facilities related to animal husbandry, hunting, and meat consumption, even though it assesses the overall concrete threat level as low.

Hunting stands have thus become a symbolic target. The armed human sits above, while the wild animal destined to be killed lives below. For some hobby hunters, hunting stands are a sign of tradition and stewardship of their territory; for parts of the animal rights movement, they represent a normalization of violence against animals.

That sparks fly here comes as little surprise.

Always someone else to blame: the convenient scapegoat

When hunting stands are toppled or set on fire, hunters' associations are remarkably quick to assign blame. It is supposedly always radical animal rights activists, city kids without respect, foreigners, militant vegans, the ALF.

Police reports are more sober. They almost always refer to unknown perpetrators, occasionally a political motivation is suspected or an acronym such as ALF is mentioned. Perpetrators are rarely identified, and there is no clear profile.

A closer look at those cases in which investigations have progressed further reveals a less comfortable picture.

A particularly revealing case unfolded in Nienhagen in the district of Celle. From 2016 onwards, elevated hunting stands were destroyed and set on fire over a period of several years. Initially, the interpretation seemed settled: something to do with hunting opponents, militant animal rights activists, so the speculation ran in those circles. In the end, police arrested a former police officer and prospective hunter from the area. He was charged with several arson attacks on elevated hunting stands and a straw stack. Regional press cited as his motive the frustration that he had not been accepted into the hunting community. The sentence of three years imprisonment is legally binding.

The case illustrates how quickly the hunting milieu points outward, even though the conflicts are often simmering from within. Officially, the usual enemy images are invoked. In reality, the fire sometimes burns from the inside.

In Switzerland too, hobby hunters have for years been whispering behind closed doors about sabotaged stands carried out from within their own ranks — driven by territorial envy, personal feuds, or because someone wants to make life difficult for an unpopular leaseholder. A Zurich regional paper noted as early as 2017 that in the past, hobby hunters themselves had repeatedly been suspected of damaging the elevated stands of other hobby hunters and staging the trail to point toward the ALF.

Official statistics on this are not published by the authorities. In police reports, such incidents appear simply as criminal damage by unknown perpetrators. The fact that this internal conflict potential exists sits poorly with the image of a harmonious, responsible hunting collective. It therefore remains in the shadows.

This gives rise to a communicative imbalance. When something happens, the public narrative almost invariably assigns blame to others — never to hobby hunting itself. The perpetrators are said to be radical animal rights activists, the damage is said to affect innocent hobby hunters and their valuable installations. The fact that those same installations serve as the basis for systematic violence against wild animals, and that conflicts also escalate within the hunting milieu itself, appears at best as a footnote.

Vandalism remains a criminal offence – but who names the structural violence?

An important distinction must be made:

• Sawing down raised hides constitutes criminal vandalism and can endanger people if tampered structures are later climbed without anyone noticing
• Those who carry out such attacks accept the risk that hunters, walkers or children may fall from damaged ladders

Hunting associations in Germany and Switzerland have also pointed this out, explicitly instructing their members to check raised hides for sabotage before use.

At the same time, public discourse largely overlooks the fact that hobby hunting itself is a system of organised violence. The outrage of the associations is directed at damaged wooden frames and metal cabins. The animals deliberately shot from these platforms are barely mentioned.

Hunting means:

• millions of wild animals shot every year across Europe
• chronic stress for sensitive ecosystems caused by baiting sites, stalking and driven hunts
• Every raised hide is a shooting platform. Many animals do not die immediately, but only after prolonged periods of flight and suffering. Driven hunts, baiting sites and stalking additionally destroy the social structures of wild boar, roe deer and foxes.
• Millions of wild animals die from hunting across Europe every year

In Trentino, for example, wildlife accident statistics are compiled as routinely as weather data. In some weeks, more than a dozen wild animals are injured or killed in traffic there. The fact that many of these animals are kept on the move in the first place by hunting pressure is barely reflected in official reports. The violence of hobby hunting has become so everyday that it has turned invisible.

Hunting as a milieu of narratives and violence

Outwardly, hobby hunting likes to speak of stewardship, tradition and responsibility. Raised hides are marketed as wildlife observation platforms, photographed in the evening light with views across fields and forests.

In practice, the reality looks quite different:

• Wild animals are accustomed to food at specific locations to make them easier to shoot.
• Shooting takes place at a distance, from an elevated and protected position, often using thermal imaging and night-vision technology.
• When shots miss, animals may perish somewhere in the undergrowth for days on end, without this ever appearing in hunting success records.

For critics, hobby hunting resembles a coin with two sides. On one side, a carefully polished image: hunting families, grilled sausages, conservation rhetoric, volunteering, tradition. On the other side, raw violence against animals and a culture of narrative deflection, in which one's own failures, risks, and suffering are preferably ignored.

When an incident occurs, the pattern is often the same:

• When hunting blinds burn, it was allegedly always someone else.
• When a hunting accident occurs, it was an unfortunate coincidence, not the systemic nature of armed recreational hunting.
• When wildlife disappears, it is the wolf, lynx, crow, or fox — rarely the human with the rifle.

This consistent shifting of blame is part of the problem. It prevents hobby hunters from honestly confronting their own role.

Escalation as a consequence of a blocked debate

Whether in Saxony, in Aargau, or now in the Valsugana: the sabotage of hunting blinds is also a symptom of political deadlock.

• Hunting policy in many regions is negotiated almost exclusively between hunting associations, forestry authorities, and agricultural interests.
• Critical voices from animal welfare, ecology, and science are marginalized, while referendums on stricter hunting laws are fought with multimillion-dollar campaigns.
• At the same time, public skepticism is growing toward driven hunts, the culling of predators, and a form of recreational hunting that markets itself as conservation while placing wildlife under permanent fire.

The Federal Intelligence Service noted several years ago that actions in the context of animal rights extremism can increase during periods of political controversy.

This does not justify a single act of sabotage. It does, however, explain why hobby hunting is increasingly not only targeting animals, but is itself becoming a target. Those who formally leave democratic channels open while allowing them to be dominated in substance by a few powerful lobbies should not be surprised by illegal pressure valves that encourage civil disobedience.

What is really at stake in the Valsugana

The destroyed hunting blinds in the Valsugana are a visible sign of a conflict that goes far beyond a few sawn-off wooden platforms. The questions behind it are what matter:

• Why are forests and landscapes being covered with a dense network of shooting platforms?
• Who bears the risk when these structures are tampered with, and why is a privately organized recreational hunt treated as a self-evident part of public spaces?
• Why does property damage to hunting installations make headlines, while the daily killing and maiming of wildlife is considered normal and barely registers in media coverage?

It is reasonable to clearly identify the acts of sabotage in Valsugana as criminal property damage. Those who saw down raised hides are playing with human lives.

Equally necessary, however, is an honest assessment of recreational hunting itself.

• Does the 21st century truly require hobby hunters to “regulate” wildlife populations, while science and conservation have long since identified alternative approaches?
• How legitimate is a practice that systematically produces animal suffering while simultaneously claiming the narrative of “nature conservation” for itself?
• And how credible is a hunting community that loudly laments damaged wooden structures, yet has barely a word to say about the animals killed from those very platforms?

The six raised hides in Valsugana will soon be replaced. The question of how much longer armed recreational hunting can be sold as a socially acceptable hobby remains. As long as every critique is reflexively dismissed as extremist and blame is always placed elsewhere, this conflict will continue to escalate. Not because a few unknown individuals reach for a saw, but because a system built on violence against animals refuses to look in the mirror.

Get involved: Petition your municipality for a tax remission request for federal and cantonal taxes, in light of the disastrous policy of Federal Councillor Albert Rösti (SVP) and the recently approved wolf culls in Switzerland. You can download the template letter here: https://wildbeimwild.com/ein-appell-fuer-eine-veraenderung-in-der-schweiz/