Recreational hunting as an economic factor: what lies behind the 180 billion

The hunting press is celebrating a figure.

180 billion euros in annual economic output, reports the European umbrella association FACE, more than a million jobs, almost one per cent of Europe’s gross domestic product. Individual countries add their own figures, Austria for instance with just under a billion. The message behind it is simple: whoever moves that much money must be doing something right. This is precisely where the fallacy begins.

Anyone who reads the study rather than just the headline can see how the figure comes about. The 180 billion does not measure the benefit of recreational hunting. What is captured is a broadly defined complex made up of the civilian arms and ammunition industry, hunting, sport shooting, related services, supply chains and modelled knock-on effects — the so-called “induced effects”. The study by the University of Urbino, therefore, does not count what recreational hunting achieves, but the economic activity generated by an entire consumer and industrial sector.

How tenuous the connection to recreational hunting itself really is becomes clear from the study’s own detailed figures. The actual arms industry accounts for 3.27 billion euros in turnover, the ammunition industry for 2.54 billion. Together that is not even six billion. The vast bulk of the celebrated sum comes from a different item: according to FACE, Europe’s recreational hunters and sport shooters spend 96.3 billion euros annually on their activities, explicitly excluding weapons and ammunition. This includes leases, equipment, optics, clothing, dogs, travel and shooting ranges. That, first and foremost, is the private consumption of a leisure group. Reinterpreting it as a social justification confuses spending with benefit.

By this logic, every costly hobby would be an “economic driver”. Golf, sailing or motorsport also move billions, and nobody derives any special social entitlement from that. A large part of this spending is not newly created value, but consumption that could just as easily flow into tourism, culture or craftsmanship. The mere fact that money is being spent yields neither a particular economic benefit nor a justification for killing animals.

And even if the figure did represent a cleanly delineated economic output of recreational hunting, it would still not be a moral argument. Tobacco, gambling and the arms trade also generate turnover, jobs and tax revenue. Nobody considers them justified as a result. Economic activity is a description, not a legitimation.

What the study explicitly did not examine is telling. The ecological and social consequences of recreational hunting were left out, as the authors themselves admit. Only one side of the ledger was counted — the income. The other side — the costs to wild animals, ecosystems and the general public — does not appear at all. This is not a cost–benefit analysis. It is a showcase of achievements, produced in the orbit of the weapons and hunting associations and presented in the fitting setting of the EU Parliament.

What is particularly interesting is when this argument surfaces. As long as recreational hunting could be sold as an ecological necessity, economic performance was rarely mentioned. Only since the myth of the hunter as nature conservationist has begun to crumble has the cash register been called as star witness. It is the same pattern we described using the example of fox hunting: the activity remains fixed, only the justification keeps rotating. First pest control, then tradition, now an economic factor. The ideology puts on a new sectarian suit, this time a business one.

The honest question is never whether recreational hunting moves money. Every hobby does that. The question is whether killing animals for pleasure needs any social justification at all, and whether a turnover figure of all things could provide it. It cannot.

“How can the death of a living being move you?”

Clear words come from the Ticino ethologist Nash Pettinaroli, president of the association AnimaLife Ticino. In an interview with tio.ch he is responding directly to the President of the Federazione Cacciatori Ticinesi (FCT), Davide Corti, who describes watching his daughter kill her prey as the most beautiful experience of his career. For Pettinaroli, this is a contradiction that makes him wonder whether it's meant as a joke. That the death of a living being should become a source of emotion doesn't add up for him. «How can the death of a living being bring you joy? Something's not right there, in my view.»

Pettinaroli doesn't stop at emotion. More and more recreational hunters are putting their lifeless prey on display, in photos, selfies and WhatsApp statuses — a development he calls disgusting. He warns of an «erosion of empathy»: behaviours that aren't actually normal are normalised for so long that in the end no empathy remains at all. He doesn't see recreational hunting itself as an ecological necessity, but as pure pleasure, dressed up with the «fairy tale» of ecosystem regulation.

Why enjoying killing is not a harmless hobby motive

From a psychological perspective, people who take pleasure in killing living creatures and pay to do so are not displaying normal leisure behaviour. This behaviour contradicts the fundamental mechanisms of empathy, compassion and moral inhibition present in the majority of psychologically healthy people. Psychologically speaking, this constitutes deviant violent behaviour, even if it is politically or culturally tolerated.

Enjoyment of killing is a classic feature of pleasure-based violence. The act of violence itself is rewarding: not the outcome, not some claimed necessity, but the killing itself. This is not a marginal phenomenon — it is clearly described in the psychology of violence.

Not everyone who hunts will experience the act of killing in the same way, or openly describe it as enjoyment. But anyone who experiences recreational hunting precisely as the pleasure of the kill, as adrenaline, triumph or personal gratification, displays a psychologically problematic motivation for violence. Historically and structurally, this is closely related to authoritarian and dehumanising ways of thinking, because it turns the killed creature into a means of one's own gratification.