Recreational hunter shoots stag – animal suffers for a long time
A recreational hunter from the central part of the canton of Schwyz shot a red deer stag.
The animal may have suffered for days.
The shooter has now been convicted of animal cruelty.
The long-standing recreational hunter had „at the very least accepted that the red deer stag he had shot would suffer for an extended period of time’, writes the Schwyz public prosecutor’s office in a legally binding penalty order.
Last September, the recreational hunter was out in a hunting area during the big game season. He spotted a male red deer stag, picked up his hunting rifle and pulled the trigger without having taken proper aim at the animal.
The stag was hit but managed to flee. The shooter lost sight of the animal. It would have been the recreational hunter’s responsibility to alert the cantonal police headquarters or contact the game warden directly.
A search could then have been launched immediately. The wildlife authority could, for example, have used a tracking dog team to pick up the trail. Instead, the recreational hunter went home.
Six days later, the dead stag was found in a neighbouring hunting area. The shooter received a conviction for wilful animal cruelty. He was sentenced to a suspended fine of 3’8600 francs. He is required to pay outright a penalty including procedural costs of 1’760 francs.
Evidently, these recreational hunters are neither well trained nor do they possess sound moral integrity.
Particularly when it comes to hunting and recreational hunters, it is essential that the public keeps a very close eye on proceedings. Nowhere else is there so much manipulation through falsehoods and fake news.Violence and lies are two sides of the same coin. For decades, recreational hunting has been nothing other than a permanently costly construction site, a patchwork of problems and a bone of contention for politics, forestry and agriculture, public administrations, the judiciary, health insurers, insurance companies, animal welfare, environmental and nature conservation organisations, the police, the federal government, the media, and so on.
Any other organisation with so much criminal energy would long since have been placed under scrutiny by the federal prosecutor’s office!
Current criminal offenses by recreational hunters in Switzerland are listed here: Link
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.
