Recreational hunter poached for years in Graubünden
A 41-year-old recreational hunter has been poaching animals in Graubünden since 2014, killing ten animals in total — including two protected royal stags. He has now been caught.
«The crown in the moss»
In Graubünden a recreational hunter has been caught who poached two protected royal stags.
Ten animals poached since 2014
The 41-year-old local recreational hunter shot two protected royal stags during the 2020 open hunting season. Instead of reporting himself to the authorities, the wildlife killer transported the two animals, each weighing around 100 kilograms, away with the help of two hunting companions. In the course of the police investigation, he admitted to having illegally killed two further royal stags, two chamois bucks, and four roe bucks between 2014 and 2020.
Business as usual in recreational hunter circles
«We condemn this in the strongest possible terms», says Martin Thöny, President of the Prättigau Hunters' Association. Isolated cases of poaching.
Update 21.7.2022: Sentencing
The offending recreational hunter was sentenced to a substantial fine and a penalty of several thousand francs for violations of the Hunting Act and the Weapons Act. In addition, his hunting licence will be revoked for several years. All trophies were confiscated.
In the statistics of the Graubünden cantonal police, there have been isolated cases of poaching over the past three years. In 2020, shotgun pellets were also found in the carcass of a wolf that had been run over by a train — apparently the wolf had been shot before it ended up under the train.
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.
