Recreational Hunters Mistake Horses for Wild Boar
When Will There Be a Competency Test for Recreational Hunters?
The recreational hunter who shot a mare in its paddock last autumn in Rohrbach, in the southern Palatinate region, is no longer permitted to hunt.
Hunting Licence Revoked
The ban is, however, only temporary. The responsible authority at the district administration announced that the recreational hunter has had his hunting and firearms licences revoked until March 2023. The wildlife killer had claimed that he accidentally shot the mare last October. He said it had been night-time and he had mistakenly taken her for a wild boar.
Horse Owner: Recreational Hunter Acted “grossly negligently”
The horse owners, a couple from Rohrbach (Südliche Weinstrasse district), had filed a complaint against the man from Herxheim. They accused him of acting with gross negligence. He had allegedly fired across district boundaries in the direction of their stable without first checking whether any animals were in the paddock.
Investigation Against Recreational Hunter Dropped
The Landau public prosecutor's office has since dropped the investigation, as gross negligence could not be proven against the man. Nevertheless, the district administration has temporarily revoked his hunting licence.
A tragic case of mistaken identity also occurred at the end of July in Hesse, when a recreational hunter believed he was aiming at a wild boar.
On 30 July, a recreational hunter near Usingen (Hesse) shot a horse. According to a police spokesperson, the animal killer spotted what he believed to be a wild boar on a horse pasture from his elevated hide at around 0:40 a.m. and opened fire. Instead of the expected wild boar, a dead horse lay at the point of impact.
The case was handed over to the relevant public prosecutor's office. Such hunting accidents are unfortunately not uncommon.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. 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.
