Hobby hunter at the top of Zug's hunting authority: SVP suspects abuse of office

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

At the centre is Beda Schlumpf, head of the Fisheries and Hunting Division at the cantonal Office for Forests and Wildlife. This is not the first attack on his post. Back in 2024, the same parliamentary group complained that Schlumpf had been appointed without a public job advertisement — by his party colleague and superior, Director of the Interior Andreas Hostettler (FDP).

The accusation: oversight of his own hobby hunting

Brunner takes issue with the fact that Schlumpf is responsible for hunting oversight while at the same time taking part in hobby hunting himself. This "self-supervision", says the SVP politician, leads to abusive behaviour. Specifically, he claims to have written evidence that beaters without a valid hunting licence took part in Schlumpf's hunts. In Zug, a pure licence hunting canton, not only the shooters but also the unarmed beaters require a valid licence.

For Brunner, the division head is thus securing one-sided privileges that would result in fines for other hobby hunters. He speaks of "abuse of office". He also criticises that Schlumpf regularly brings his dog into the office without authorisation.

The Department of the Interior disagrees

The canton rejects the account unusually clearly, even though pending interpellations are normally only answered as part of the formal government response. According to a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, the authority to conduct checks and impose fines does not lie with the division head, but with the game wardens, who are expressly not permitted to hunt. Other staff of the office may participate under clearly defined conditions. An internal directive from August 2025 governs the roles and the handling of conflicts of interest.

The main accusation is, according to current information, incorrect, the spokesperson says. Schlumpf participated in big game hunting on two work-free afternoons with a valid big game licence. A hunting trainee was present as an accompanying person without a licence, but he did not supervise her. Such accompaniments serve to "impart hunting experience" and are customary and permitted. The dog is a trained tracking dog for the follow-up search of injured animals, holding a permit issued by the Public Works Office in July 2024.

The actual conflict runs deeper

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

Even the canton's exonerating version illustrates this problem. The authority responsible for hobby hunting passes hunting knowledge on to up-and-coming staff and describes this as a matter of course. Precisely this pattern, the close personal and cultural entanglement of oversight and hobby hunting, is not limited to Zug. Comparable cases are documented, for example, for the St. Gallen hunting administration, where a hunting-affiliated office shapes wolf management, and more broadly in the dossier on the hunting lobby in Switzerland. The fact that politics protects hobby hunting is no coincidence, but part of the same system.

What credible oversight would require

A wildlife policy oriented towards science and animal welfare would strictly separate interest representation and enforcement. Oversight, population surveys and sanctioning belong in the hands of bodies that are not personally linked to hobby hunting, as the dossier Regulate hobby hunters, not predators sets out. That it 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 folkloric special case, but a system tried and tested for over fifty years with high biodiversity.

The question of the neutrality of the Zug hunting authority is currently particularly pressing. The canton has initiated a scientific review of fox hunting, after a petition called its biological basis into question. Whether an authority so closely intertwined with hobby hunting can conduct such a review impartially is likely to be among the most important open questions, far beyond this single personnel matter.

Song: The green felt