Buying woodland and keeping it hunt-free: how private ownership becomes a protected zone for wild animals

Buying a piece of woodland, leaving the trees standing, letting nature take its course: what sounds like an expensive dream is more affordable than most people think.

A report by Swiss Radio and Television shows private individuals doing exactly that, out of love for nature rather than the pursuit of profit. For people who are critical of hunting, this immediately raises a further question: can you exclude so-called hobby hunting — leisure hunting without any existential necessity — on your own woodland and thereby create a genuine refuge for wild animals?

Buying woodland is possible, but rarely visible

Anyone who has never seen a woodland advertisement is not alone. Woodland parcels are hardly ever publicly advertised; the trade has traditionally taken place quietly through local district foresters, neighbours and inheritances. By now, however, there are specialised marketplaces as well as cross-border woodland exchanges covering the entire German-speaking area. Prices vary greatly, demand clearly exceeds supply, and since the pandemic the desire to own one's own woodland has grown noticeably.

Important to know: anyone who buys woodland does not acquire a freely available property. Forest law severely restricts ownership rights. A building ban applies, the public's right of access remains in place, and management obligations are added on top. So you cannot «privatise» the woodland. What you can achieve, however, is the exclusion of hobby hunting, and this is precisely where it becomes political.

Where you can buy woodland and land

Because woodland is only rarely openly advertised, a targeted approach pays off. Three routes are most likely to lead to the goal.

Approach the local forestry service. The classic and most frequently recommended route in Switzerland: the responsible district forester of the desired municipality knows the local ownership situation and often knows who is willing to sell. In Germany and Austria, the municipal or state forestry offices play a similar role.

Use specialised forest marketplaces. There are now platforms that fill precisely the gap left by public listings:

• Switzerland: Wooded.ch (forest marketplace with offers and requests, free for both parties) and TerraWald.ch (discreet off-market brokerage).
• Across the DACH region: the Wald-Börse with offers and requests from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
• General property portals: On the major search portals, woodland plots usually appear only as part of larger properties, but a search for “forest” or “woodland plot” with an e-mail alert can be worthwhile.

Place your own listing. Anyone with a particular region in mind can place a request in the local newspaper or in specialist forestry journals. Since many forest owners have a connection to agriculture, agricultural classified papers are also a sensible place.

A realistic note: demand significantly exceeds supply; cheap plots for a few francs per square metre are — especially in the German-speaking area — the exception rather than the rule. Anyone buying should find out beforehand about their obligations as a forest owner, because patience and local knowledge are often more important than budget.

The key: hunting pacification on ethical grounds

The legal basis was established long ago, and not through a single ruling but through settled case law of the European Court of Human Rights. In three separate proceedings against three different states, the Court reached the same conclusion: Chassagnou v France (1999), Schneider v Luxembourg (2007) and Herrmann v Germany (2012). The core is the same each time: anyone who rejects hobby hunting on ethical grounds may not be forced to tolerate it on their own land. Such an obligation to tolerate violates the protection of property under the European Convention on Human Rights.

This sets the human-rights guideline: under Strasbourg case law, states are obliged to grant landowners an exemption on grounds of conscience — the precise form is left to them. France, Luxembourg, Germany and Portugal have amended their hunting law accordingly. The three German-speaking countries, however, still draw very different conclusions from this.

Germany: the path is open

Germany has responded. Since the end of 2013, landowners have been able under Section 6a of the Federal Hunting Act to apply for the hunting-law pacification of land parcels on ethical grounds. In practice the path is arduous and often lengthy, but it exists and leads to the goal, as numerous successful cases show.

Austria: holding on to the existing legal situation

Austria has so far held on to the existing legal situation. In October 2017 the Austrian Constitutional Court confirmed that landowners must continue to tolerate hunting on their land and membership in a hunting cooperative even against their ethical convictions. Withdrawing from a hunting cooperative on grounds of conscience is not possible in Austria. Affected landowners have therefore lodged a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, relying on precisely that case law already handed down against France, Luxembourg and Germany.

Switzerland: the law is in place, the will is lacking

As a contracting state, Switzerland is bound by the same European Convention on Human Rights as France, Luxembourg and Germany. Under the Court's current interpretation of the ECHR, no one should have to tolerate hobby hunting on their own land if they reject it on ethical grounds. At the same time, Switzerland has a particularly direct lever: since hunting law is regulated at cantonal level and federal law does not oblige any canton to introduce hobby hunting, a cantonal decision sufficed in Geneva. What is lacking is not the law, but the political will to grant private forest owners the right to have their land pacified from hunting on ethical grounds.

Buying forest as a quiet act of wildlife protection

This is where the circle closes. Anyone who buys forest in order to protect it thinks first of trees, of old-growth timber, of biodiversity. The logical next step is to also make this forest a hunting-free zone. In Germany this is already possible today, Austria still blocks it, and in Switzerland all that is lacking is the political will to implement a long-recognised right. Property entails obligations, as the saying goes. But it can also empower: to a piece of land on which wild animals can finally find peace.

Editor's comment: That a person may refuse killing on their own land was set out unmistakably by the ECtHR in three judgments against three states. That Austria continues to force its citizens to tolerate hobby hunting, and that Switzerland withholds this right from its landowners, is an anachronism that ought to be corrected politically.

From the forest to a political lever

Anyone who owns forest in Switzerland and wants to keep it hunting-free is not dependent on the goodwill of individual authorities, but can take a political approach. The IG Wild beim Wild provides a ready-made template text for this, intended to give landowners the right to exempt their land from hunting on ethical grounds, explicitly analogous to regulations in several EU states and the Geneva model. In this way, a private question of conscience becomes a cantonal initiative that parliamentarians, parties and committed private individuals can submit directly.

Become active now

• Template text: hunting moratorium on private forest, exemption on ethical grounds
• All template texts for hunting-critical initiatives in cantonal parliaments

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