Hunting victims in Europe: Dead, injured and no statistics

In France, 100 hunting accidents involving firearms were officially recorded in the 2024/2025 season: 11 dead, 16 injured non-hunters, including three with life-threatening injuries, and 135 incidents of property damage in which 58 homes, 27 vehicles and 50 pets were hit by gunfire. In Italy, the University of Urbino counts 62 accidents and 14 deaths for the same season, although these figures are based on media analysis and suggest considerable hidden numbers. An analysis by Maldita counted 63 deaths and 483 injuries in Spain from August 2007 to December 2020, 215 of them serious, excluding Catalonia and the Basque Country. In Switzerland, a hunting accident statistically occurs every 29 hours; since 2000, more than 75 people have been killed in connection with recreational hunting.

What links these figures is that they are not the result of systematic European monitoring, but fragments drawn from national government reports, media analyses, NGO dossiers and freedom-of-information requests. There is no central, publicly accessible register of hunting accidents in Europe. The hunting lobby has no interest in one being created. And most governments do not ask.

What recreational hunters present as an 'unavoidable residual risk' of a 'responsible leisure activity' turns out, on closer inspection, to be a structural safety problem: tens of thousands of armed recreational hunters move every year through forests, fields and mountain regions that are also used by walkers, hikers, mushroom pickers, farmers, residents and pets. When people die as a result, it is treated as an isolated case. This dossier shows why it is not.

AVC dossier from Italy, the OFB statistics from France, the transparency-request data from Spain, the BFU analyses from Switzerland and the PETA chronicle from the German-speaking world prove it: hunting victims are not a misfortune. They are the predictable result of an armed mass leisure activity without adequate state oversight, without European coordination and with a lobby that has successfully prevented the public from knowing the true scale of the problem for decades.

What awaits you here

France: The only country with full state-run recording, and what its figures show. How the Office français de la biodiversité (OFB) systematically documents hunting accidents, why the figures for the 2024/2025 season are alarming, and what 135 property-damage incidents per season say about the scale of the problem.
Italy: The AVC dossier and an organisation that fights the lobby. How the Associazione Vittime della Caccia (AVC) has documented hunting victims since 2007, what the 2025/2026 dossier shows, and why the hunting lobby successfully urged the state to strip the organisation of its status as a recognised environmental protection organisation.
Spain: 63 dead in 14 years and no nationwide register: How Spain obtained hunting accident data through a transparency request, what the Guardia Civil data show, and why regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country do not even appear in the national statistics.
Switzerland: 300 accidents a year and a systematically undercounted hidden figure: What the BFU statistics and the UVG data say about recreational hunting, which groups of people are missing from the statistics, and what annual costs of CHF 3.6 million reveal about the true extent.
Germany: No central statistics, PETA keeps the chronicle: Why Germany still has no official overall recording of hunting accidents, how PETA fills this gap, and what the individual case reports have in common structurally.
Bystanders as victims: walkers, pets, residents: Who becomes a victim outside the recreational hunting community, what patterns the documentation shows, and why public space is not a safe place as long as recreational hunting takes place in it.
The European hidden figure: What the data do not show: Why all available figures are underestimates, what distortions arise from missing registers, differing definitions and political pressure, and what an honest overall picture would mean.
What needs to change: Concrete political demands: an EU-wide accident register, a national reporting obligation, public exclusion zones, liability reform.
Talking points: Answers to the most common justifications offered by recreational hunters and their associations.
Quick links: All relevant articles, studies and dossiers at a glance.

France: the only country with full state recording, and what its figures show

France is a special case in Europe: the Office français de la biodiversité (OFB) has been systematically recording hunting accidents for years and publishes annual reports, a practice that does not exist in the majority of European countries. This transparency comes at a price: it makes visible what remains in the dark elsewhere.

For the 2024/2025 season, the OFB reports 100 accidents involving firearms, 11 deaths, all of them recreational hunters, as well as 16 injured non-hunters, three of them seriously. In addition there were 135 property damage incidents, in which 58 homes, 27 vehicles and 50 pets were shot at. In the 2024/2025 season, fatal accidents rose from 6 to 11, almost double the figure of the previous two years. For the 2025/2026 season, the OFB reported 92 accidents, four of them fatal (The Great Hunting Lie). The figures fluctuate sharply from season to season; a single good year is no proof of structural safety. The animal welfare organisation ASPAS speaks of a 'significantly increased' number and warns that the long-term downward trend in accident figures does not justify the annual upward spikes.

What makes the OFB figures particularly revealing is that they show not only hunting accidents involving injury to persons, but also the houses, vehicles and pets that were shot at, a category that simply does not exist in other national statistics. If, in France alone, 58 homes and 27 vehicles are shot at in a single season, this is not a marginal phenomenon but a yardstick for how much broader the danger posed by recreational hunting in public space is than accident figures involving injury to persons suggest.

More on this: A Man Dies in Harchies and Europe Looks Away and Hunting in Switzerland: fact check, types of hunting, criticism

Italy: the AVC dossier and an organisation that fights the lobby

In Italy there is no comprehensive state record of hunting accidents. What exists instead is the work of the Associazione Vittime della Caccia (AVC), which since 2007 has systematically evaluated media reports, documented individual cases and published a dossier every year. In parallel, the University of Urbino analyses press reports nationwide. For the 2024/2025 season the University of Urbino counted 62 accidents and 14 deaths, and for the 2025/2026 season 45 accidents and 8 deaths; in doing so it filters out falls, illness, deliberate acts and poaching.

AVC dossier 2025/2026 goes further still. It documents 46 victims: 33 recreational hunters (10 dead, 23 injured) and 13 people who had no connection whatsoever to recreational hunting (2 dead, 11 injured): walkers, neighbours, family members, bystanders. The dossier records the most cases in Piedmont and Sicily (7 each), ahead of Tuscany (6) and Sardinia (5). The ratio between victims among recreational hunters and uninvolved victims is not a marginal phenomenon but a structural warning sign. Fewer recreational hunters, yet a persistently high number of victims: the claimed improvement in safety is not happening in reality.

How does the hunting lobby react to this documentation? In 2023 the Federazione Italiana della Caccia welcomed the Italian Ministry of the Environment's decision to strip the AVC of its status as a recognised environmental protection organisation. The official justification: the figures published by the AVC were "undoubtedly partisan" and likely to cause "social alarm". In other words, the hunting lobby has successfully ensured that Italy's most important documentation of victims was discredited by the state. That is not a response to a safety problem. It is a cover-up of it.

More on this: Hunting Victims in Italy: The AVC Dossier 2025/2026 and Hunting and Animal Welfare: What the Practice Does to Wild Animals

Spain: 63 dead in 14 years and no nationwide register

In Spain there is no nationwide register of hunting accidents. What is available is the result of a transparency request made by the investigative platform Maldita.es to the Guardia Civil: for the period August 2007 to December 2020, that is, almost 14 years, the analysis found 63 deaths and 483 injuries, 215 of them serious. And that is without the data from Catalonia and the Basque Country, which have their own police structures and do not appear in full in the Guardia Civil's national statistics.

For 2025 alone, a media analysis documents 9 deaths and 27 injuries in at least 9 autonomous communities. The fatal hunting accident in Catalonia in November 2025, in which one recreational hunter killed another on a private reserve, is emblematic of a pattern: the province of Toledo tops the Spanish accident list, followed by areas in Castilla-La Mancha, a region where recreational hunting is deeply rooted in everyday culture and is accordingly questioned very little.

What the Spanish data show particularly clearly is the geographical inequality of the available information: where police powers are decentralised, hunting accidents vanish from the national statistics. This is not a technical problem but a political one: if hunting accidents do not have to be recorded centrally, there is no political pressure to reduce them.

More on this: Fatal hunting accident in Spain: A shot that should shake Europe and A Man Dies in Harchies and Europe Looks Away

Switzerland: 300 accidents a year and a systematically undercounted hidden figure

In Switzerland, data from the BFU (Swiss Council for Accident Prevention) and SUVA at least salvage part of the picture. Between 2000 and 2019, more than 75 people were killed in hunting accidents. Statistically speaking, a hunting accident occurs every 29 hours; roughly every three and a half months, a person loses their life. For the years 2016 to 2020, the UVG data confirm: around 300 recognised accidents a year, about 1 death, 2 new disability pensions, and total annual costs of around 3.6 million francs.

Yet these figures must be read with one crucial caveat: the UVG statistics only cover employed persons with compulsory accident insurance. Pensioners, the self-employed, children, homemakers and students are missing entirely. Yet retired recreational hunters in particular make up a considerable and growing share of those who stand in the hunting ground with a firearm in autumn. What they experience, suffer or cause appears in no official Swiss hunting accident statistics. There is no duty to report hunting injuries and deaths, regardless of insurance status, at either federal or cantonal level. In Switzerland, the statistics on fatal hunting accidents thus reliably counts only what the insurance system captures, and systematically ignores what happens outside it.

The canton of Grisons is particularly accident-prone, followed by hunting accidents abroad and the cantons of Ticino, Aargau, Valais, St. Gallen and Bern. All people who have died in hunting accidents since 2000 and have a BFU entry were resident in Switzerland; hunting tourism from abroad therefore does not appear in this statistic at all. The true extent of the danger is thus significantly higher than the official figures suggest.

More on this: Dossier: Hunting Accidents in Switzerland, Already three deaths during recreational hunting and Initiative calls for «Game wardens instead of hunters»

Germany: No central statistics, PETA keeps the chronicle

To this day, Germany has no official nationwide statistics on hunting accidents. What exists at federal level are fragmentary health reporting data on firearm deaths, which do not differentiate by context and allow no conclusions about hunting accidents in the specific sense. The animal rights organisation PETA fills this gap with a chronicle of hunting accidents and acts of violence involving hunters' weapons in the German-speaking world, a continuously updated collection of individual cases that shows what state authorities do not record systematically.

The chronicle documents a broad spectrum: pets shot dead, walkers wounded by gunfire, hunting accidents among hunters, people mistaken for game, cases of hunting dogs being shot. It also shows that hunting weapons are used in the context of disputes and shooting rampages, an aspect that appears systematically in no hunting statistics. A Correctiv fact check of the claim that around 130 people have been killed by hunters in Germany since 2015 could not verify this figure, not because it is wrong, but because the available data is simply insufficient to prove or disprove it. That in itself is a finding.

The German example stands for a European pattern: where there is no reporting obligation, no data is produced. Where no data is produced, no political pressure arises. And where no political pressure arises, nothing changes. In Germany, as in other countries, the hunting lobby has successfully prevented hunting accidents from being recorded with the same rigour as, for example, road accidents or workplace accidents. The result is a structural information deficit that harms the victims first and foremost.

More on this: Hunting and animal cruelty and Category page: Crime and Hunting

Bystanders as victims: walkers, pets, residents

In the public mind, hunting accidents are often treated as accidents within the hunting community: one recreational hunter accidentally hits another, a shot goes in the wrong direction, a fall on steep terrain. That is wrong, not only as a description but as a political framing. A growing share of the victims have nothing to do with recreational hunting.

In France, 16 non-hunters were officially injured by gunshots in the 2024/2025 season, three of them seriously. The property damage figures for the same year list 58 houses and 27 vehicles that were shot at: real living spaces of people who were at home or on the road on a Sunday afternoon and had no idea that a recreational hunter was firing nearby. In Italy, according to the AVC dossier, 13 people who had no connection whatsoever to recreational hunting were killed or injured in the 2025/2026 season. In Spain, a media analysis finds that the pattern is not geographically random but closely tied to the hunting intensity of each region.

In Switzerland and the German-speaking world, the PETA chronicle repeatedly documents cases in which pets were shot dead, hikers were hit by gunfire or people near hunting grounds were put in mortal danger. During the hunting season, public space, whether forest, field or mountain meadow, is no longer a neutral place. It temporarily becomes an armed exclusion zone, without the people who use it being systematically warned or protected. This is not a side effect of recreational hunting. It is a structural feature of it.

More on this: A Man Dies in Harchies and Europe Looks Away and Dossier: Hunting and Animal Welfare

The European hidden figure: What the data do not show

All available figures on hunting victims in Europe are underestimates. This is not an assertion but a methodological fact arising from several factors. First: only France records hunting accidents systematically and comprehensively through a state authority. All other countries rely on media analyses, insurance data, transparency requests or NGO documentation, in other words sources that are structurally incomplete.

Second, the definitions vary. What counts as a "hunting accident" in France may be recorded in Spain, Germany or Switzerland as a "firearms accident", "hunting activity", "leisure accident" or not recorded at all. Falls and fatal falls during the hunting season, triggered by time pressure, darkness or terrain, often do not appear as "hunting accidents" in Swiss UVG statistics, even though they are causally exactly that. Third, retirees, children, the self-employed and other groups who are not compulsorily insured are missing almost entirely from national statistics. In recreational hunting in particular, the over-60 age group is disproportionately large.

What a complete European register would show can be guessed from the fragments available: hundreds of deaths per decade, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of cases of property damage, a growing share of uninvolved victims, and a lobby that successfully prevents these figures from being brought together and presented to the public in their entirety. The call for an EU-wide register is therefore not bureaucratic but democratic: anyone who does not measure risks cannot be held answerable for them.

More on this: Switzerland: statistics on fatal hunting accidents and Hunting myths: 12 claims you should scrutinise critically

What needs to change

First: an EU-wide, standardised register for hunting accidents. The European Commission keeps detailed accident statistics for road traffic, the workplace and consumer goods. There is no equivalent for hunting accidents. A mandatory, standardised reporting system at EU level, with uniform definitions, category schemes and a public reporting obligation, is the basic prerequisite for making the structural scale of the problem visible.

Second: a national reporting obligation for all hunting accidents involving personal injury. In Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy and other European countries, hunting accidents involving personal injury must be reported promptly and in full to a central body, regardless of the insurance status of those affected. This reporting obligation must also apply to accidents outside the hunting season and to accidents involving hunting weapons in a leisure context.

Third: public signposting of exclusion zones during the hunting season. When drive hunts, driven hunts and high hunts take place, the affected areas must be clearly marked, and publicly accessible, for the duration of the hunt. The right to freely use public space does not end where a group of recreational hunters with weapons moves in. Hiking trails, recreational areas and public forests are not hunting reserves.

Fourth: liability reform. Anyone who, as a recreational hunter or hunt organiser, injures or kills people through negligent conduct must be liable in civil law to the fullest extent, including for psychological harm, consequential costs and damage to pets. The current legal situation in many countries privileges recreational hunting over other armed leisure activities.

Fifth: compulsory insurance and proof of safety. Obtaining a hunting licence must be tied, across Europe, to current proof of safety: regular refresher training, shooting tests and psychological fitness assessments. Anyone who moves through public space with a lethal weapon must demonstrate that they are capable of doing so, and not just once, at the first hunting course.

Sixth: a ban on drive hunts and group hunts on Sundays and public holidays. In France and Italy, demands for a hunting ban on Sundays and public holidays have already been debated in parliament. The reasoning is simple: on these days, particularly large numbers of people use public space for recreation, so the risk of coming near a recreational hunt is greatest. A Sunday in the woods should not be a safety risk.

Talking points

“Hunting accidents are rare, and the statistics show a positive trend.” The supposedly positive trend is based on data that is structurally incomplete. Retirees, the self-employed and other groups without compulsory insurance are missing from almost all national statistics. In France, the only country with genuinely complete recording, fatal accidents rose to 11 in the 2024/2025 season; a year later there were four. No trend can be read from swings like these. Anyone who speaks of a positive trend is describing a slice of reality, not reality itself.

“Most victims are recreational hunters themselves; it is a risk they have taken on voluntarily.” Firstly, that is not true for a growing share of the victims: in Italy, according to the AVC dossier 2025/2026, 13 people were killed or injured who had no connection whatsoever to recreational hunting. In France, 16 non-hunters were injured by gunshots. Secondly, even if recreational hunters take risks among themselves, they do so in public space, a space that others also use without being asked.

“Modern training and safety rules have drastically reduced accident figures.” If that is true, why is there no complete, publicly accessible accident statistic in any European country other than France? The claim of falling numbers cannot be verified where no figures are collected. And where figures do exist, as in France, they fluctuate widely: 11 deaths in the 2024/2025 season, four in the 2025/2026 season.

“Hunting accidents are not comparable with road accidents; they are too rare to be politically relevant.” In France, in the 2024/2025 season, 58 homes, 27 vehicles and 50 pets were officially hit by gunfire. These are property damage incidents in populated areas, regardless of whether anyone was injured. If the same number of houses were being shot at in the course of some other armed leisure activity, the issue would immediately be politically relevant. The difference lies not in the scale but in social acceptance.

“We are interested in safety ourselves; the hunting lobby is working intensively on it.” The Federazione Italiana della Caccia successfully lobbied the Italian Ministry of the Environment to strip the AVC, the country's most important documentation of victims, of its protected status. That is not safety work. That is suppression of information.

“In Switzerland, hunting is well regulated.” The Swiss UVG statistics systematically exclude large population groups, including retired recreational hunters, from accident recording. There is no reporting obligation for hunting injuries and deaths outside the insurance system. The actual number of hunting accidents and deaths is therefore considerably higher than the official figures, in a country that sees itself as a champion of animal welfare.

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Our Standard

Hunting victims in Europe are not an unavoidable residual risk of a harmless leisure pursuit. They are the foreseeable result of an armed mass activity without sufficient state oversight, without European coordination and with a lobby that has spent decades preventing the public from knowing the true scale of the problem. France shows what is possible when a state records accidents in full and reports them publicly. What France's figures reveal is alarming. What a complete European record would reveal is, therefore, easy to foresee.

The first and most urgent consequence is political: an EU-wide, standardised register of hunting accidents, combined with national reporting obligations, public signposting of exclusion zones and a liability reform that effectively protects uninvolved victims. The second consequence is societal: recreational hunting is an armed leisure activity in public space. It is not a privileged special domain that can escape state oversight simply because it has a tradition. Where people die and houses are shot at, transparency is not an option but a minimum democratic requirement. This dossier is updated on an ongoing basis whenever new figures, rulings or political developments require it.

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