Hunting and biodiversity: does hunting protect nature?

«Recreational hunting protects biodiversity» is a sentence that works well politically. It sounds modern, scientific and responsible. Hunting associations repeat it at every opportunity: in press releases, in consultation responses, in talks with authorities. JagdSchweiz states on its own website that recreational hunters make «a vital contribution to the protection of biodiversity». That sounds like evidence. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that what is being marketed as a nature conservation achievement is actually a utilisation practice dressed up with an ecological label.

Biodiversity is more than the number of animal species in an area. It encompasses genetic diversity within populations, the diversity of habitats and the functionality of ecological systems: insects, soil organisms, fungal networks, plant communities, water quality, structural richness. The Federal Biodiversity Strategy identifies the greatest threats to biodiversity in Switzerland: habitat loss due to urban growth and infrastructure, intensive agriculture, pesticides, light pollution, climate change and a lack of ecological connectivity. Recreational hunting does not appear in this analysis as a protective factor. It is not a threat factor in the narrower sense either, but it is just as far from being the instrument it claims to be.

Anyone who takes biodiversity seriously must protect habitats, promote connectivity and reduce human pressures. Recreational hunting does none of this. Every year, it removes around 76,000 hoofed wild animals and 22,000 predators from ecosystems, alters social structures, creates hunting pressure and behavioural changes, and ties every kill to politically determined kill quotas rather than to ecological target values. This can have localised effects. But constructing a blanket nature conservation justification from this is not technically tenable.

What awaits you here

• The biodiversity crisis and the hunting narrative. Why the claim «hunting protects biodiversity» works politically but does not hold up technically, and which factors actually threaten biodiversity.
• Selectivity and social structures. How recreational hunting alters age, sex and social structures in wildlife populations, and why this has little to do with species conservation.
• Indirect effects: when hunting pressure disrupts nature. How hunted game shifts habitats, becomes more nocturnal and thereby creates new conflicts, which in turn serve as an argument for hunting.
• Feeding and population support. Why supplementary feeding undermines natural processes, promotes disease and is rarely beneficial to biodiversity.
• Predators instead of recreational hunting. Why the return of natural regulators such as wolf and lynx is more effective for biodiversity than annual kill quotas.
• Browsing damage is not everything. Why reducing biodiversity to forest-wildlife conflicts falls short, and which factors really matter.
• What would need to change. Political demands for a biodiversity strategy that relies on habitat protection instead of recreational hunting.
• Argumentary. Answers to the most common justifications of the recreational hunting lobby regarding biodiversity.
• Quick links. All relevant articles, studies and dossiers at a glance.

Selectivity and social structures: when kills deform populations

Recreational hunting is rarely a fine-tuned ecological regulation. It follows kill quotas, traditions, licence rights and individual preferences. Some animals are preferentially killed, others spared. This alters age and sex structures within populations and can have far-reaching consequences for species with complex social behaviour.

In red deer, for example, studies show that the targeted removal of experienced lead animals destabilises migration patterns, spatial behaviour and reproductive dynamics. Young, inexperienced animals take on roles for which they are socially unprepared. The result: disordered groups, increased movement unrest and heightened browsing pressure, because the animals behave differently in their refuge areas than they would within stable social groups. Prof. Dr. Josef H. Reichholf describes the mechanism as follows: «Hunting does not regulate. It creates inflated and suppressed populations.» Population ecology shows that intensive hunting triggers compensatory increases in reproduction: earlier sexual maturity, larger litters, higher survival rates among offspring. The more intensively an area is hunted, the more offspring result.

In foxes, this effect is particularly well documented. In heavily hunted populations, the average age drops drastically, territorial structures collapse, and the reproduction rate rises. In Switzerland, around 20,000 red foxes are killed every year, yet populations remain stable or continue to grow. Luxembourg has placed the fox under protection since 2015 and has since recorded no population explosion — but rather a 20 per cent reduction in fox tapeworm infection rates, because stable social structures slow the spread of parasites.

What the recreational hunting lobby calls “population regulation” is in truth a periodic harvest of wild animals that frequently stabilises or even increases population numbers while destroying social structures that are essential to the functioning of ecosystems. This is not biodiversity protection. It is an intervention that replaces ecological complexity with simplified kill quotas.

More on this: Why recreational hunting fails as population control and Fox hunting without facts: How JagdSchweiz invents problems

Indirect effects: when hunting pressure disrupts nature

Recreational hunting influences not only how many animals live in an area, but above all how they behave. Under hunting pressure, Wild animals fundamentally change their use of space: they avoid open areas, retreat into dense forest stands, and shift their activity into the night. Prof. Ilse Storch, head of the Chair of Wildlife Ecology and Management at the University of Freiburg, states plainly: “Humans are perceived as a danger.” This is not habituation, but a biologically grounded stress response to a lethal threat.

These behavioural changes have consequences that extend far beyond the individual animal. When roe deer and red deer avoid open areas and concentrate in the forest, browsing pressure on young trees, shrubs, and ground vegetation increases there. What the recreational hunting describes as “forest protection” thus partly produces exactly the browsing damage it claims to combat: because driven hunts and drive hunts chase wild animals in panic into those refuge areas, where they then strip the available vegetation under heightened stress. The connection is well documented scientifically: a 14-year study measuring cortisol concentrations in blood samples from killed and deceased ungulates shows that animals from drive hunts exhibit drastically higher stress hormone levels than those that died undisturbed.

The nocturnal shift has additional consequences: when wild animals move their activity into the dark, the risk of wildlife-related traffic accidents increases. A US study in Wisconsin showed that the return of wolves, which naturally regulate wild animal behaviour, reduced wildlife collisions by 24 per cent. Recreational hunting, by contrast, produces exactly the flight responses and stress reactions that contribute to such accidents, and then uses the resulting accident statistics as an argument for more kills. It is a self-legitimising cycle.

These indirect effects are serious for biodiversity. When hunted game avoids certain areas, its ecological contribution is lost there: seed dispersal, vegetation mosaics created through selective grazing, trampling effects that create small habitats. The landscape becomes more uniform instead of more diverse. Recreational hunting does not only change populations, it changes landscapes.

More on this: Studies on the impact of hunting on wild animals and Wild animals, mortal fear and lack of stunning

Feeding and population support: when nature conservation becomes production

In many hunting grounds, wild animals are fed, officially out of «necessity» during harsh winters, but in practice often to support population numbers or to steer wild animals into particular areas. Feeding fundamentally alters natural selection mechanisms. What nature regulates through food scarcity, disease and winter mortality is undermined by human intervention: more animals survive the winter than the habitat can naturally sustain.

The consequences for biodiversity are well documented. Feeding stations create unnatural concentrations of many animals in a confined space. This favours the transmission of parasites and diseases, increases browsing pressure in the immediate surroundings, and disrupts the natural spatial distribution. Studies on the spread of tuberculosis among red deer in alpine areas show that feeding sites act as hotspots for disease transmission. What is presented as an animal welfare measure actually harms the health of the population.

The biodiversity contradiction is fundamental in nature: feeding keeps populations at a level that would not exist without human intervention. These artificially inflated populations then generate the very browsing damage that in turn serves as an argument for more kills. Recreational hunting thus creates its own need for regulation. Anyone who feeds wild animals in winter so that enough kills are possible in autumn is not practising biodiversity policy but population management, a production logic that has nothing to do with nature conservation.

A biodiversity strategy worthy of the name relies on natural winter mortality as a regulating element, on habitats adapted to their location that enable wild animals to survive even without feeding, and on a wildlife policy that does not depend on kill numbers and hunting licence sales.

More on this: Alternatives to Hunting: What Really Helps, Without Killing Animals and Hunting and Animal Welfare: What the Practice Does to Wild Animals

Predators instead of recreational hunting: what natural regulation achieves

The most effective regulators of ungulate populations are not recreational hunter with rifle and kill quota, but predators: wolf, lynx, bear. These species have shaped the ecosystems in which biodiversity arises for thousands of years. Their return to Switzerland is, from a biodiversity perspective, one of the most important developments of recent decades.

The ecological effect of predators goes far beyond the mere reduction of prey numbers. The “Landscape of Fear” effect describes how the mere presence of wolves changes the spatial behaviour of red deer and roe deer: the animals avoid certain areas, change locations more frequently, and spend less time in sensitive places. The vegetation in these areas can recover: young trees grow back, riparian vegetation stabilises, and new habitats emerge for insects, birds and small mammals. In Yellowstone National Park, this cascade was scientifically documented following the reintroduction of wolves in 1995: changed elk movements led to the regeneration of willows and aspens, which in turn strengthened beaver, fish and songbird populations.

Comparable patterns can be seen in Switzerland. In Grisons, the return of the wolf has already helped, in certain areas, to reduce the roe deer population and the special hunt. The forestry association welcomes this development, because natural browsing pressure is declining. In regions such as Toggenburg, Uri, the Bernese Oberland and Solothurn, the lynx has demonstrably reduced roe deer populations. A study of 3,000 wolf scat samples in Germany found that over 96 per cent of prey remains came from roe deer, red deer and wild boar – precisely the species that recreational hunting claims to "regulate".

The decisive difference: predators regulate selectively, continuously and without the destabilising side effects of human hunting. They preferentially take sick, weak and inexperienced individuals. They do not create seasonal stress peaks. They require no kill quotas, no licence sales and no politically negotiated quotas. The increasing wolf kills in Switzerland thus counteract precisely the natural regulation that would be most effective for biodiversity. Anyone who wants biodiversity must accept predators, not combat them.

More on this: The wolf in Europe: How politics and recreational hunting are undermining species protection and Wildlife corridors and habitat connectivity

Browsing damage isn’t everything: why the biodiversity debate falls short

The forest-wildlife conflict dominates the public debate about recreational hunting and nature. Too many roe deer eat too many young trees, goes the standard argument. The solution: more kills. What is overlooked in this: browsing damage is a symptom, not a cause. And biodiversity is far more than the question of whether a particular sapling survives.

The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss in Switzerland are not roe deer and red deer. They are habitat loss through settlement growth and infrastructure, intensive agriculture with the use of pesticides and fertilisers, fragmentation of habitats through roads and fences, climate change with shifting vegetation zones and phenologies, as well as light pollution, which disrupts nocturnal insects and their food webs. In Switzerland’s Red List, over a third of all species examined are classified as threatened. Species loss particularly affects insects, amphibians, reptiles and plants – groups that recreational hunting does not address at all.

Browsing pressure itself has several causes that go beyond the mere number of roe deer: monocultures in forestry offer less alternative food than structurally diverse mixed forests. Climate stress weakens young trees and makes them more vulnerable. And hunting-induced retreat of wild animals into the forest concentrates browsing pressure on a smaller area. The Swiss National Park has shown for over a hundred years that forests can thrive and regenerate naturally without recreational hunting, provided habitats are intact and natural dynamics are allowed to unfold.

Protecting biodiversity requires a holistic perspective: converting forests into climate-resilient mixed woodlands, reducing pesticides, connecting habitats through Wildlife corridors, promoting predators, removing migration barriers, and protecting wetlands, dry meadows and forest edges. None of this requires an armed militia practising licence hunting. Anyone who reduces the biodiversity debate to the forest-wildlife conflict and presents recreational hunting as the solution is diverting attention from the real causes and serving a narrative that primarily safeguards the survival of recreational hunting, not the survival of species diversity.

More on this: Climate change, genetic diversity and recreational hunting and Geneva and the hunting ban

Geneva's counterexample: biodiversity without recreational hunting

The strongest empirical argument against the claim that “recreational hunting protects biodiversity” lies right in the middle of Switzerland. In 1974, the canton of Geneva abolished militia hunting by popular vote. Since then, wildlife management has been carried out exclusively by state-employed game wardens, according to clear criteria, transparently and without any trophy logic.

The biodiversity balance after more than 50 years is clear: The long-standing Geneva Fauna inspector Gottlieb Dändliker (2001 to 2025) recorded a sharp increase in the bird population, from a few hundred to 30,000 winter visitors. A network of diverse habitats has developed across the canton, providing a home for a wide variety of animals and plants, some of them rare. A long-term study confirms the strong increase in biodiversity. Wild animals use Geneva as a refuge from the surrounding, hunted areas. The population benefits from more frequent, less stressful wildlife observations and greater social acceptance of wild animals in settled areas.

The Geneva model not only disproves the claim that recreational hunting is indispensable for biodiversity. It also shows that the opposite is possible: more biodiversity without recreational hunting. Dispensing with seasonal hunting pressure, driven hunts and drive hunts, feeding stations, and the systematic removal of predators creates conditions under which natural processes can become effective again. Geneva is living proof that a wildlife policy without militia-based hunting not only works, but even delivers better results for biodiversity.

More on this: Hunting in the Canton of Geneva: hunting ban, psychology and the perception of violence and Initiative calls for «Game wardens instead of hunters»

What needs to change

• Biodiversity strategy without dependence on hunting: Nature conservation must rely on habitat protection, connectivity and the reduction of human pressures, not on annual kill quotas. Recreational hunting must not be regarded as the default instrument of biodiversity policy. Template motion: Wildlife corridors and rest zones
• Promoting predators as natural regulators: Wolves, lynx and other predators are the most effective instruments for regulating ungulate populations and promoting natural ecosystem dynamics. Their return must be politically supported rather than counteracted through kills.
• Independent biodiversity evaluation of recreational hunting: Scientifically independent studies are needed on whether and how recreational hunting actually affects biodiversity in Switzerland, both positively and negatively. The recreational hunters' own self-assessment as “nature conservationists” is not sufficient evidence. Template motion: Transparent hunting statistics
• Ban on wildlife feeding outside clearly defined emergency situations: Population support through feeding contradicts a biodiversity strategy that relies on natural processes. The definition of an “emergency situation” must be scientifically grounded and regulated uniformly across cantons.
• Decoupling forest–wildlife conflicts from the legitimisation of recreational hunting: Browsing damage problems are primarily the result of habitat loss, climate change and hunting-induced behavioural changes. Biodiversity policy must address these causes instead of reflexively calling for more kills.

Talking points

«Recreational hunting protects biodiversity.» Biodiversity depends primarily on habitats, connectivity, soil life, insects and natural processes. Recreational hunting selectively interferes with individual species, alters social structures and, through hunting pressure, triggers behavioural changes that create new conflicts. A blanket nature conservation justification for a leisure activity that kills animals according to a kill quota is not technically tenable.

«Without recreational hunting, the forest would be destroyed by browsing damage.» Browsing damage is a real problem, but its causes run deeper: habitat loss, climate stress, monocultures in forestry, and hunting-induced retreat of wild animals into the forest. Studies show that intensive hunting pressure drives wild animals precisely to where they cause the greatest damage. The Swiss National Park has shown for over a hundred years that forests can survive without recreational hunting.

«Predators alone cannot regulate wildlife populations.» Predators have regulated ungulate populations more effectively than any human kill planning for thousands of years. The return of the wolf to Grisons has lowered the roe deer population and reduced the special hunt. In Wisconsin, the return of wolves reduced wildlife collisions by 24 percent. The claim that predators «aren't enough» primarily serves to uphold the recreational hunting system.

«Feeding is necessary so that wild animals can survive the winter.» Wildlife feeding alters natural selection mechanisms, favours disease transmission and parasites, leads to an unnatural concentration of many animals in a few places, and boosts populations beyond the level that the habitat can naturally sustain. Nature functioned for thousands of years without human feeding. Feeding often does not serve animal welfare but rather population support for the next hunting season.

«Biodiversity needs active management, not inaction.» Active management means protecting habitats, connecting them and reducing human pressures, not routinely killing animals. Game warden structures based on the Geneva model, predator promotion, habitat management and wildlife corridors are active management. Recreational hunting with trophy logic, kill quotas and licence sales is a usage system, not a conservation concept.

Quick links

Articles on Wild beim Wild:

• Why recreational hunting fails as population control
• Studies on the impact of hunting on wild animals
• Switzerland hunts, but why still?
• Initiative calls for «Game wardens instead of hunters»
• Animal welfare versus hunting practices in Switzerland
• The recreational hunter in the 21st century

Related dossiers:

• An introduction to criticism of hunting: What recreational hunting really is – and why it has no future
• The hunting licence
• Hunting in Switzerland: figures, systems, and the end of a narrative
• Hunters: role, power, training and criticism
• Hunting myths: 12 claims you should scrutinise critically
• Hunting and biodiversity: Does hunting really protect nature?
• Game meat in Switzerland
• Hunting Ban Switzerland
• argumentation guide for professional game wardens
• Hunting and Human Rights

Our Standard

The claim that recreational hunting protects biodiversity does not withstand expert scrutiny. Biodiversity arises from intact habitats, natural processes and functioning food webs, not from kill quotas and licence hunting. A nature conservation policy that treats recreational hunting as a standard instrument confuses use with protection. This dossier is continuously expanded whenever new studies, data or political developments require it.

We document what works without recreational hunting: renaturation projects, wildlife corridors, extensification areas, the return of predators, hunting-free zones. Do you know of an example from your region, your canton or your municipality?Write to us. We will use it to build a documented overview of long-term effects, as counter-evidence to a narrative claiming that without recreational hunting nature would collapse.

More on the topic of recreational hunting: in our hunting dossier we bring together fact checks, analyses and background reports.