Recreational hunter at the head of Zug's hunting authority: SVP suspects abuse of office

The interpellation was submitted by Philip C. Brunner, group leader of the SVP in the Zug cantonal parliament.

At the centre of the matter is Beda Schlumpf, head of the fisheries and hunting division at the cantonal Office for Forest and Wildlife. This is not the first challenge to this position. Already in 2024, the same parliamentary group complained that Schlumpf had been appointed without a public tender – by his party colleague and superior, the Director of the Interior Andreas Hostettler (FDP).

The accusation: overseeing his own recreational hunting

Brunner takes issue with the fact that Schlumpf is responsible for hunting supervision while also taking part in recreational hunting himself. This «self-supervision», the SVP politician says, leads to abusive conduct. Specifically, he claims to have written evidence that beaters without a valid hunting licence took part in Schlumpf's hunts. In Zug, a canton that operates purely under the licence hunting system, not only the shooters but also the unarmed beaters require a valid licence.

According to Brunner, the division head is thereby securing one-sided privileges that would result in fines for other recreational hunters. He speaks of «abuse of office». He further criticises that Schlumpf regularly brings his dog into the office without authorisation.

The Directorate of the Interior disagrees

The canton rejects the portrayal unusually clearly, even though pending interpellations are normally only answered as part of the formal government response. According to a spokesperson for the Directorate of the Interior, control and fining authority does not lie with the head of department but with the game wardens, who are explicitly not permitted to hunt. Other staff of the office may participate under clearly defined conditions. An internal directive from August 2025 regulates the roles and the handling of conflicts of interest.

The spokesperson describes the main allegation as inaccurate based on current knowledge. Schlumpf had taken part in the high hunt on two afternoons off work with a valid high-game licence. Present was a hunting trainee as an accompanying person without a licence, whom he did not, however, supervise. Such accompaniments serve to "impart hunting experience" and are common and permitted. The dog in question is a trained blood tracking dog for the follow-up search of injured animals, with a permit from the Building Authority dated July 2024.

The real conflict lies deeper

Whether the individual allegations are accurate remains to be clarified. What is remarkable, however, is a finding that stands regardless of the outcome: at the head of Zug's hunting oversight body is a man who has institutionally represented the interests of the recreational hunting community for years. Even before his appointment, Schlumpf sat on the cantonal hunting commission as a "representative of the hunting community". Anyone who manages wildlife populations, plans interventions, and is at the same time supposed to oversee their own activity embodies a classic conflict of interest.

Even the canton's exculpatory version illustrates this problem. The authority responsible for recreational hunting passes on hunting knowledge to up-and-coming personnel and describes this as a matter of course. This exact pattern, the close personal and cultural entanglement of oversight and recreational hunting, is not confined to Zug. Comparable findings have been documented, for instance, for the St. Gallen hunting administration, where a body closely tied to hunting shapes wolf management, and more fundamentally in the dossier on the hunting lobby in Switzerland. The fact that politics protects recreational hunting is thus no coincidence, but part of the same system.

What credible oversight would require

A wildlife policy guided by science and animal welfare would strictly separate advocacy from enforcement. Oversight, population surveys and sanctioning belong in the hands of bodies whose staff have no personal ties to recreational hunting, as the dossier Recreational hunters regulate, not the predators sets out. That things can be done differently is shown by the canton of Geneva, which has banned hunting since 1974 and entrusts wildlife management to employed professional game wardens. The Geneva model is not a quirky exception but a system tested over more than fifty years, with high biodiversity.

The question of the Zug hunting authority's neutrality is currently particularly pressing. The canton has initiated a scientific review of fox hunting, after a petition had cast doubt on its biological basis. Whether an authority so closely entwined with recreational hunting can conduct such a review impartially is likely to be one of the most important open questions, extending far beyond the individual case.

Song: The Green Cronyism Network