Germany: The Hidden Dangers of Recreational Hunting
In 2023 alone, 17 hunting accidents occurred in Germany. Four people, three horses and one cow were killed, nine people were partly seriously injured.
17 Hunting accidents in this year alone
Risk during a walk: Despite mandatory “hunting training,” it happens time and again that recreational hunters endanger passers-by through stray shots or ricochets.
According to media reports, as many as seventeen hunting accidents have already occurred across Germany this year alone. Four people, three horses and one cow were killed, and nine people were partly seriously injured. The animal rights organisation PETA is therefore urging the population in Lower Saxony to exercise increased caution during the main hunting season, which continues until the end of January.
“In 2023 too, incidents are once again accumulating in which stray shots or ricochets endanger, injure or even kill people and animals. Some recreational hunters have mistaken horses or cattle for wild boar or raccoons. Further proof that shots are being fired recklessly at anything that moves. Recreational hunting is a danger to every living being in the vicinity — it must finally be banned at the federal level through new legislation.”
Peter Höffken, policy adviser at PETA
Accidents involving fatal shots are on the rise
Serious hunting accidents regularly cause outrage. As recently as early November, a 82-year-old farmer was fatally shot while on his tractor near Blankenheim during a driven hunt. In August, an 18-year-old died in Dötlingen after straying into the line of fire of a companion of the same age. On the same day, a 54-year-old man in Lippstadt was struck in the head by a rifle bullet fired by an 83-year-old hunting participant.
Recreational hunting is unnecessary and counterproductive
Recognised studies demonstrate that from an ecological standpoint there is no necessity for Recreational Hunting exists. According to renowned biologist Prof. Dr. Josef Reichholf, natural regulation of wildlife populations living in forests occurs through environmental influences such as weather conditions, food availability, and disease.
English experts also concluded that fox populations, for example, regulate themselves based on food availability and social factors. Recreational hunting, on the other hand, destroys the age and social structures of animal populations, leading to increased reproduction among survivors. Losses are thus quickly offset or even overcompensated by offspring and immigration.
Recreational hunting is unnecessary, counterproductive and cruel. The approximately 400’000 recreational hunters in Germany are opposed by only around 1’000 professional hunters, primarily forestry officials.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
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.
