Why animal welfare law ends at the forest edge

In Swiss slaughterhouses, it is clearly regulated that no animal may be bled out without prior stunning. Even crayfish and fish have been protected since 2022. During recreational hunting, different rules apply: wild animals regularly die without stunning, in mortal fear, in pain and often after lengthy flight phases. Using legal foundations, studies and figures, this dossier shows how little protection wild animals actually have at present and what would need to change so that their deaths no longer remain a blind spot in legislation.

What awaits you here

Legal framework: How the Swiss Animal Welfare Act mandates a stunning requirement while simultaneously exempting recreational hunting from it. Why wild animals are legally less protected than animals slaughtered for meat.
Dying process: What actually happens during recreational hunting, from the chase through the grazing shot to the failed follow-up search, and why mortal fear is not a rare mishap but part of the system.
Figures and studies: What the STS report, the federal hunting statistics and research data reveal about missed shots, flight distances and follow-up search rates.
Dignity in death: Why the dying process during recreational hunting is incompatible with any standard we consider appropriate in palliative medicine, veterinary medicine or ethics.
Argumentation guide: Answers to the most common objections raised by the recreational hunting lobby.
Quick links: All relevant articles, studies and sources at a glance.

Stunning Requirement: Who Is Protected and Who Is Not

Switzerland takes the protection of animals during slaughter seriously – on paper, at least. Art. 21 para. 1 of the Animal Welfare Act (TSchG) requires that animals be stunned before slaughter and bleeding. Art. 178 para. 1 of the Animal Welfare Ordinance (TSchV) extends this obligation to all vertebrates: they may only be killed under stunning, unless an emergency situation exists. Since the revision of the Ordinance on Animal Welfare during Slaughter (VTSchS), which took effect on 1 January 2022, explicit provisions now also apply to fish and crustaceans. Anyone who violates the stunning requirement commits the criminal offence of improper slaughter (Art. 177ff. TSchV in conjunction with Art. 28 para. 1 lit. f or lit. g TSchG). Faulty stunning generally counts as mistreatment.

Yet it is precisely here that the legislator creates an exception with enormous consequences in practice. Art. 178a para. 1 lit. a TSchV exempts recreational hunting from the stunning requirement. The shot from a distance replaces stunning – at least in theory. The Foundation for the Animal in Law (TIR) puts it unambiguously: hunting is exempt from the stunning requirement, even if the killing method used does not immediately render the animal unconscious and unable to perceive.

In practice, this exception means that wild animals are legally less protected than cattle, chickens or lobsters in the cooking pot. What would be considered a violation of animal welfare and punishable in a slaughterhouse – namely letting an animal bleed to death while fully conscious – is permitted in the hunting ground. This unequal treatment reveals a hierarchy of compassion: animals we see in the barn receive minimum standards. Animals that live "outside" lose their rights the moment a recreational hunter loads their rifle. Anyone who takes animal welfare seriously must openly name this discrepancy.

More on this: Hunting and Animal Welfare: What the Practice Does to Wild Animals

Mortal fear is part of the system

Hunting romanticism speaks of "fast, clean shots" that supposedly kill the animal "in an instant". The reality begins earlier, at the moment the animal notices it is being pursued.Driven hunts and drive hunts are, from the perspective of the wild animal, organised panic: flight over long distances, overexertion, disorientation, and the sense that the familiar surroundings have suddenly become life-threatening. Mortal fear is not a slip-up but an integral part of the process.

Even in the case of Stand hunting, where the recreational hunter wants to shoot «unexpectedly», a structural problem remains: no shot is perfect, no animal a rigid target on a shooting range. Small deviations in distance, wind, movement or rest position are enough for the hit not to be fatal, but merely to injure. For the animal affected, this makes the difference between an instant end and hours or days full of pain.

The dying process, which is rarely discussed publicly, looks concretely like this: roe deer with shattered legs fleeing into the forest. Red deer with stomach wounds bleeding to death internally. Foxes with shattered jaws, unable to either feed or hunt. None of this is a theoretical extreme case, but the flip side of every leisure activity involving a loaded weapon. In addition, animals fleeing in panic release large quantities of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Their metabolism tips over, their muscles become acidified. This favours tough, watery meat of limited quality — a stark contradiction to the narrative that recreational hunting produces «noble, healthy» game meat.

More on this: The psychology of hunting and Driven Hunt in Switzerland

Grazing shots and follow-up searches: what the figures say

Official hunting statistics sound orderly: in the 2023 hunting year, around 30,000 recreational hunters in Switzerland killed around 76,000 hoofed wild animals (roe deer, red deer, chamois, wild boar) as well as nearly 22,000 predators (red fox, badger, pine marten, stone marten). In total, almost 100,000 animals were shot. An estimated 135,000 roe deer, 40,000 red deer and 86,000 chamois live in Switzerland.

Invisible remain those animals that were hit but never recovered. The Swiss Animal Protection STS examined this problem systematically in its report «Grazing shots and follow-up searches in Swiss hunting».

Key findings of the STS report

The success rate of follow-up searches for injured game is, depending on the canton, only 35 to 65 per cent. Around half of the animals shot and wounded during recreational hunting can never be released from their suffering, despite follow-up searches. According to federal hunting statistics, a total of 334 wild animals that had died from gunshot wounds were found in 2014, including 30 red deer, 191 roe deer and 15 chamois. The STS calls these findings «the tip of the iceberg».

An extrapolation based on data from the canton of Grisons (where around 6 percent of shot animals are reported annually as wounded but not killed) yields an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 wounded animals fleeing in pain across Switzerland each year. Nine of 26 cantons refused to provide the STS with any information at all, despite being reminded of the Freedom of Information Act. Some cantons have neither a reporting obligation for follow-up searches nor any data on their success rate.

International comparative data

A Danish study (Elmeros et al., 2012, European Journal of Wildlife Research) found that around 25 percent of foxes shot and found dead there bore traces of previous shots in their bodies: individual pellets that had become encapsulated and survived. No comparable systematic data exists for Switzerland.

In its statement on «Animal welfare and driven hunts», the German Veterinary Association for Animal Welfare (TVT) notes that, depending on the analysis, up to around 70 percent of animals shot during drive hunts are not killed instantly but flee wounded. In a large German study (research team led by Anja Martin, over 2,000 kills of roe deer and wild boar evaluated), 30 to 40 percent of animals, depending on species and ammunition type, still flee significantly more than ten metres after being hit. In roe deer shot in the head or thorax, flight distances were significantly longer in driven hunts than in wait hunting or stalking.

What happens to a wounded animal

Grazing shots and follow-up searches appear only rudimentarily in the statistics of many cantons. What happens to an animal that has been grazed by a shot and is never found again? It flees for as long as it has strength, hides, and suffers. Open bone fractures, internal bleeding, shattered organs or jaws rarely lead to a quick death. These animals frequently die over days or weeks from infections, hypothermia or hunger, because they can no longer feed. The mandatory follow-up search – that is, the later tracking of wounded animals with dogs – is readily presented as evidence of hunters' sense of responsibility. Yet every follow-up search is an admission of a prior mistake. And even these searches often fail: trails go cold, terrain is confusing, weather conditions change, and animals cross the boundaries of hunting grounds.

All those who are never found vanish from the moral horizon, even though they represent precisely the mortal fear and agony that animal welfare law is meant to prevent.

More on this: Dubious Swiss hunting authorities and Hunting and animal cruelty

«Redeemed» or killed? The language of recreational hunting

Linguistically, recreational hunting likes to present a gentle face. Animals are “redeemed”, “taken”, “bagged”, as if it were a technical routine. Rarely do recreational hunters simply say: “I killed this animal.” The choice of words is no coincidence, but a psychological shield. Anyone who kills regularly, without being existentially dependent on the meat, must above all explain to themselves why this should be acceptable.

From an animal ethics perspective, the core conflict is clear: if someone pursues and kills animals in their leisure time, despite being perfectly able to eat a plant-based diet or source food elsewhere, it is not about necessity but about pleasure, tradition and identity. The notion of “redemption” serves as a moral soft-focus filter. One supposedly takes from the animal not its life, but merely its suffering. The fact that this suffering is often only created by recreational hunting itself, through chasing, shooting and injuries, is conveniently overlooked.

Psychologically, motives such as power over life and death, coping with one's own mortality, group belonging, and distancing oneself from a “softened” urban society can be observed. Recreational hunting may subjectively be experienced as “primal instinct”, but objectively it remains a decision: do I go into the forest with a rifle today to deliberately end the life of another creature, or not? Anyone who justifies this decision with “fun”, “passion” or “connection to nature” should ask themselves why these feelings apparently need a death in order to be expressed.

More on this: Dossier «The Psychology of Hunting» and The recreational hunter in the 21st century

The dying process: palliative medicine, veterinary medicine and recreational hunting compared

In human medicine, the final phase of life is regarded as a particularly deserving of protection. Palliative medicine and ethics speak of “dying with dignity”: pain is to be alleviated, fear reduced, and people are not to be left alone. No one would seriously consider chasing a dying person through the forest, shooting them, and then leaving them to their fate.

Veterinary recommendations on euthanasia likewise emphasise calm, low-pain or pain-free methods, an environment that is as familiar as possible, the avoidance of panic, and the presence of trusted companions. Even guidebooks for animal keepers state that animals should die as free of fear as possible, without struggle and without stress.

If one contrasts this understanding with the dying process on the recreational hunt, two worlds collide. Here, death is regularly the result of a sudden shot from a distance, without warning, without any possibility of preparation, without any form of companionship. It is not uncommon for the animals first to experience being chased, driven hunts, or the experience of their familiar surroundings being combed through by armed people and dogs. What follows is not a "calm final phase" but an explosion of mortal terror: flight, disorientation, pain when the shot wounds rather than kills, and often a lonely death somewhere in the thicket.

The asymmetry of interests is central: in palliative medicine, the well-being of the dying person is at the centre; in veterinary medicine, the well-being of the animal. On the recreational hunt, by contrast, it is the interest of the recreational hunter that dominates — kill numbers, trophies, rituals, identity. The animal is the object of a leisure activity, not the subject of a dying process that would need to be protected. If we were to seriously apply the same standards formulated in palliative medicine and animal ethics to wild animals, the greater part of today's recreational hunting would simply be untenable.

More on this: Hunting myths: 12 claims you should scrutinise critically and Hunting and biodiversity: how recreational hunting endangers species diversity

Professional wildlife wardens instead of recreational marksmen: the Geneva model

There are situations in which intervention in wildlife populations does not seem entirely avoidable: traffic and safety risks, severely injured animals after collisions, individual animals with proven, concrete damage. The question is who carries out such interventions and with what mandate.

A recreational hunter who is at the same time an advocate for their own scene inevitably has conflicts of interest. A professional wildlife wardens service, by contrast, operates within a clear legal mandate, with training, oversight and reporting duties. The canton of Geneva, which has managed without militia hunting since 1974 and relies on professional game wardens, shows that the killing of wild animals does not necessarily have to be outsourced to private leisure actors.

Where wildlife wardens are responsible, the line between "enjoyment of hunting" and necessary hazard prevention does not blur in the same way. That does not mean every shot is automatically compliant with animal welfare standards, but it does reduce the influence of a lobby that portrays itself as indispensable. Anyone who seriously argues that animals must be "put out of their misery" should insist that this be done by professionals with demonstrable competence and strict oversight, not by people who, at the weekend, with colleagues, trophy pressure and group dynamics bearing down on them, shoot at anything that fits the criteria.

The STS report documents the problem of oversight: in the territorial-hunting cantons, hunting supervision is not the responsibility of state-salaried game wardens, but of a chairman appointed by the respective hunting grounds themselves. From the STS's perspective, this raises the question of possible bias.

More on this: Canton of Geneva: wildlife management without recreational hunting and Alternatives to Hunting: What Really Helps, Without Killing Animals

What needs to change

If the principle that animals should not die in mortal fear and avoidable suffering is taken seriously, the reality of hunting in Switzerland is indefensible. Six concrete starting points.

Reviewing the hunting exemption: The exemption of recreational hunting from the stunning requirement (Art. 178a para. 1 lit. a TSchV) is at the heart of the problem. Of course, classic slaughter stunning cannot be replicated in the forest, but the standard should be clear: no system of recreational hunting may structurally produce more suffering than is technically avoidable. This would require short shooting distances, strict weapon and ammunition specifications, comprehensive documentation obligations and harsh sanctions for missed shots, and would call many of today's common hunting methods into question.
Transparency about grazing shots: An honest statistic would have to record, nationwide and uniformly, how many animals are wounded, how many are put out of their misery through a follow-up search, and how many are never found. The STS is calling for an explicit obligation to conduct follow-up searches, enshrined in the federal hunting act, together with a duty to report and public transparency about success rates. The fact that nine cantons refused the STS any information at all, despite the Freedom of Information Act, shows how far current practice is from this.
Separating recreational hunting from professional hazard prevention: What is genuinely necessary belongs in the hands of an independent wildlife wardens service. Everything else is a dispensable leisure activity at the expense of the weaker. The Geneva model proves that this can work.
Restricting driven hunts: The data situation is clear: drive hunts and driven hunts systematically produce more misses, longer flight distances and more animal suffering than other forms of hunting. A ban on shotgun shots at roe deer and wild boar, as demanded by the Swiss Animal Protection organisation (STS), would be a minimum step.
Independent hunting oversight: Hunting oversight must be organised by the state, independent and accountable, not through supervisors appointed by the hunting associations themselves.
Establishing cost transparency: Society must know what recreational hunting costs, not only in francs for wildlife wardens and administration, but in animal suffering, misses and lost ecosystem services.
Template motions: Template texts for hunting-critical motions and Zero tolerance for alcohol and drugs in recreational hunting

Talking points

«A clean bullet does not violate animal welfare.» A technically perfect, instantly fatal shot would theoretically be less problematic. In practice, however, it is not the norm but the exception. The Martin study shows that 30 to 40 percent of animals hit still flee over ten metres. The German Animal Welfare Veterinary Association (TVT) speaks of up to 70 percent of hits during driven hunts not being immediately fatal. Animal welfare law must be measured against the normal case, not against the ideal image presented by the recreational hunting lobby.

«Hunting is necessary to regulate populations.» This claim is disputed. Ecosystems with intact predators, natural selection and adapted land use can function without widespread recreational hunting. Where intervention is necessary, professional wildlife wardens can step in, without requiring 30,000 recreational hunters with trophy interests. The Geneva model has been working for over 50 years.

«Do wild animals suffer more during hunting than in the slaughterhouse?» The situations cannot be compared one to one, but one thing is clear: in the slaughterhouse there is a stunning requirement and controlled procedures. In recreational hunting, pursuit, mortal fear and a considerable risk of non-fatal shots are part of the system. The follow-up search rate of 35 to 65 percent means that up to half of all wounded animals are never put out of their misery.

«Hunting can be regulated so that animals hardly suffer.» Suffering can be reduced, but not brought down to a minimum comparable to stunning in the slaughterhouse. As long as firearms are used from a distance to shoot at fleeing or unpredictably reacting animals, mortal fear, misses and failed follow-up searches will remain part of the system.

«Isn't it hypocritical to eat meat and reject recreational hunting?» What is truly hypocritical is demanding strict animal welfare standards for farm animals while suddenly accepting exceptions for wild animals. It is precisely here that the arbitrariness of protecting wild animals less than animals in the barn becomes clear. The most consistent answer remains: eat less or no meat, and avoid leisure activities that turn death and suffering into entertainment.

«Does mortal fear affect the quality of game meat?» Yes. Animals fleeing in panic release large amounts of stress hormones. Their metabolism tips over, and the muscle tissue becomes acidic. The result is poor-quality meat, which contradicts the marketing narrative of «noble game meat».

«Hunting is deeply rooted in our culture.» Tradition is no argument for continuing practices that are untenable by today's ethical and scientific standards. Bear-baiting, cockfighting and fox-hunting were also culturally rooted before societies recognised that animal suffering is not a cultural asset.

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Our Standard

Wild animals deserve the same protection from suffering and mortal fear that we grant farm animals in the slaughterhouse. This dossier documents how Swiss animal welfare law ends at the forest boundary, why recreational hunting structurally produces more suffering than would be technically avoidable, and why professional wildlife wardens are the only approach that remains compatible with honest animal welfare law. The dossier is continuously updated whenever new data, studies or political developments require it.

More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our hunting dossier we compile fact checks, analyses and background reports.