Federal Hunting Act: Recreational hunting of red deer and roe deer

Deep winter. Roe deer and red deer are conserving energy. Yet recreational hunting continues. A critical look at the German Federal Hunting Act.

Wild beim Wild Editorial Team · 26 January 2021

Deep winter. Many parts of Germany are covered in snow. Roe deer and red deer have switched into energy-saving mode.

Kill-for-cash events in deep winter

Yet there are still numerous state forestry operations offering communal hunts on these ruminant even-toed ungulates well into January. Federal Minister Klöckner continues to lower the hurdles of animal welfare even further.

Already today, so-called hoofed game has the longest hunting seasons in Europe in Germany. There is no month in which these animals are not pursued. To ensure that even more wild animals are killed in future, Klöckner wants to abolish official kill-quota planning

Milder measures possible

The population of roe deer or red deer is not even decisive for their impact on forest regeneration. So there are options for milder measures than the lethal solution envisaged by the Klöckner administration. A statement by the German Legal Society for Animal Welfare Law (DJGT) sees this as a violation of Article 20a of the German Basic Law.

In a recent statement, 28 animal welfare and nature conservation organisations reject the draft amendment to the Federal Hunting Act, which is hostile to animal welfare and wild animals.

More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.

The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.

Wild beim Wild editorial team

All articles are written by IG Wild beim Wild as well as by external co-authors. Research, structuring and editorial processes may be supported by AI-assisted tools.