Violence and Lies: Two Sides of the Same Coin at the German Hunting Association

Violence and lies belong to the same coin.

And nowhere is this as visible as at the German Hunting Association.

The Fundamental Lie: «Nature Conservation»

For decades the DJV has claimed that hobby hunting is «applied nature conservation». Scientific studies prove the opposite: intensive hunting causes many animal populations to grow. Hunting destroys family groups and social structures, the life expectancy of wild animals drops drastically, sexual maturity arrives earlier and the birth rate rises. Wild animals possess natural regulatory mechanisms that are thousands of years old. Interventions through hunting regularly lead to the opposite of the stated goals: stronger reproduction and more wildlife damage. Hobby hunting creates the very problem it claims to solve. The DJV knows this. It simply does not say so.

Feeding Wildlife: The Self-Made Problem

Wildlife populations, especially excessively in the case of wild boar, have been catapulted to these population levels by the hunting community with thousands of tonnes of supplementary feed every year. The danger to our nature does not come from the wild animals, but from the people who keep these animal populations high and want to hunt them. The sequence is always the same: feed, breed up, shoot, report record bag, talk about nature conservation.

«Management with the Gun»: Shooting Nature to Pieces

The DJV invokes the statutory «duty of management» – the supposed mandate to ensure healthy wildlife populations through hunting. Management with the gun: shooting nature to pieces in order to protect it. This is not a contradiction that can be overlooked. It is the business model.

The Canton of Geneva has proven since 1974 that there is another way. Before the hunting ban, well over 400 hunting licences were sold annually. Today, twelve professional game wardens of the «Police de la nature» carry out all necessary interventions – for the entire canton, without additional posts. Biodiversity has increased markedly. The number of overwintering waterfowl has multiplied from a few hundred to around 30’000. Red deer and wild boars, practically wiped out before the ban, have returned. Geneva today is home to the largest brown hare population in Switzerland. And the cost? Less than a cup of coffee per person per year – including game damage prevention and compensation. That is genuine nature conservation. Not 400 hobby hunters with high-tech rifles and SUVs.

Game meat: lead, carcinogens and the WHO

For most people, game meat is simply inedible without days of marinating, intensive seasoning or further processing into sausages and smoked products. No one eats it raw – that is reserved for predators, which need neither fire nor a kitchen. In practice, this places game meat in exactly the category that the World Health Organization (WHO) has classified as a Group 1 carcinogen: processed red meat, in the same risk class as arsenic, asbestos and tobacco smoke.

Anyone who does not understand these simple, scientifically proven connections – or deliberately conceals them – has no business being in nature. An association that mentions WHO warnings neither in its hunting training nor in its press releases is not running a nature conservation organisation. It is running a sect and, alongside the wild animals, is quite deliberately harming its own members as well.

On top of that come metal residues from the ammunition. The problem is structurally unsolvable: lead-containing ammunition demonstrably leaves elevated lead levels in the wound channel and the surrounding tissue. But even the much-praised “lead-free” alternatives – copper, zinc, tungsten, tin – do not solve the problem, they merely shift it. Studies show that released zinc and copper ions from alternative ammunition can be highly toxic to certain organisms. Even the US Army introduced tungsten-containing training rounds as a “less toxic” alternative, but ended their procurement after later studies called their safety into question. The fundamental problem remains: anyone who fires metal projectiles into an animal that is then to be eaten inevitably introduces heavy metals into the food. Lead-free does not mean poison-free.

In Germany, lead ammunition is already banned for hunting in several federal states, and in Lower Saxony it has been banned entirely since April 2025. The hunting lobby celebrates this as progress. What it conceals: the ammunition problem persists. Added to this are uncontrolled hygiene during game processing in the field and the fact that 60 percent of known human infectious diseases are of animal origin. Game processing operations are subject to far less stringent controls than slaughterhouses. The risks of game meat are a health topic in their own right, one that the DJV consistently keeps quiet about.

The wolf: number manipulation in the service of the kill

On the subject of the wolf, the DJV shows how lobbying with manipulated figures works. The association attempts to portray the scientifically recognised “Central European lowland population” of wolves as part of a much larger Baltic population. The background is simple: in that case, 250 instead of 1,000 adult wolves would be sufficient for a “favourable conservation status” – and approval for hunting would be easier to obtain. The wolf population is to be downsized on paper so that killing it becomes legal. This is not biology. This is interest-driven politics with a scientific veneer.

Up to 40 dead per year: the great silence

Every year in Germany, up to 40 people die at the hands of hunters and hunters' weapons. Neither the hunting association nor state authorities nor the Federal Statistical Office keep records of this. Fatal relationship dramas in which hobby hunters shoot their partner, family members or neighbours are not legally classified as a «hunting accident» and appear in no official tally. A study by the Max Planck Institute spanning ten years arrives at around 100 deaths in family dramas annually in Germany, mostly involving legal weapons. The victims are not only fellow hunters: wives, children, neighbours, walkers, mountain hikers, playing children.

What is not counted does not officially exist. That is no coincidence. That is by design.

Lobby register and political arm

The DJV is officially registered in the lobby register of the German Bundestag. It advises in discussions and at specialist events, drafts position papers and submits opinions on legislative proposals. In other words: the association sits directly at the source of legislation and shapes hunting law according to its own interests. That it simultaneously claims to act in the service of the general public and nature is the greatest lie of all.

The pattern

Violence and lies go together because they pursue the same goal: to secure and expand the right to kill. The lie – «nature conservation», «biodiversity», «healthy meat», «duty of stewardship» – creates social acceptance. The violence, whether through hunting weapons, through the killing of predators, through the silencing of victims, carries out what the lie has legitimised.

The DJV is not a nature conservation association. It is a weapons lobby with a green veneer and political connections reaching into the Bundestag. Whoever forgets this fails to understand why the hunting acts in Germany are the way they are – and why they are so difficult to change.

Further background on the psychology behind hobby hunting and on crime committed by hobby hunters at wildbeimwild.com.