Hobby hunters, what are they?

First, we analyse exactly what a hobby hunter is, and then what the pseudo-hunter is.

The hobby hunter

A hobby is, according to Wikipedia, a leisure activity that the practitioner pursues voluntarily and regularly, which serves their own pleasure or relaxation and contributes to their own self-image — in other words, forms part of their identity. The word “hobby” derives from the English hobby horse, which translates into German as «Steckenpferd» in both senses — a child's toy and a leisure activity.

In our latitudes, hunting is nowadays an activity carried out for the most part in the leisure time of working people. The reason for this is that today no one needs to go hunting in order to feed themselves. The Stone Age is over.

«Today, however, there is no ethic that advocates the killing of animals or the consumption of meat, since we have long been able to nourish ourselves in a violence-free and healthy way, without having to roam through forest and field killing».

IG Wild beim Wild

When people hunted in the past, it was done with respect for life and only to feed one's own clan. Foxes, birds and the like were not killed for fun because one was bored, sought relaxation or sought recreation through a misunderstood experience of nature (which, on closer analysis, does not work either – see Hunting fever).

You can twist and turn it however you like — in the German-speaking world, hunting takes place mainly in people's leisure time. This is not an invention of radical animal welfare activists, but simply a fact. Hobby hunters will always remain amateurs, because they are precisely not professional hunters or professional game wardens.

Even a pensioner in a shoot-everything-dead society, who can spend many hours in the forest every day, is a hobby hunter, because he does this in his leisure time.

Both the hobby hunter (indoctrination, hunters' tall tales) and the game warden (scientific expertise) can be well trained. Theory, however, is not everything. A gram of practice is worth more than tonnes of theory.

It would never occur to anyone to attribute a higher quality standard to a rough-and-tumble amateur tournament with hobby footballers than to the Champions League with professional footballers. It is crystal clear that professional wildlife wardens would bring an entirely different level in place of hobby hunters. The wild animals benefit from this through less animal suffering, as do the population, nature and the environment.

Many hobby hunters are apparently already overwhelmed by these simple connections and have great difficulty placing them correctly in their minds.

The managing director David Clavadetscher of Jagd Schweiz in Zofingen, for example, claims in a Swiss tabloid newspaper: «The term ‘hobby hunter’ was constructed by militant opponents of hunting to disparage the demanding activity of hunters». Can he prove this, or is it once again just hunter's tall tales?

In any case, there is nothing wrong with the terms «hobby hunter», «leisure hunter», «amateur hunter» and so on, for the term describes a state of affairs in a linguistically precise and flawless manner.

The pseudo-hunter

The prefix pseudo on the other hand makes clear that something is not genuine, but merely imitated or copied.

Pseudo is frequently used to express that a person or thing is someone or something only in appearance, or gives the appearance of being someone or something, but in reality is not.

The managing director David Clavadetscher and co. are not real hunters as we know them from indigenous peoples, but always also pseudo-hunters who, in their free time, often simply pursue a decadent, sadistic or even cruel hobby — something that even the real hunters of indigenous peoples would never condone or do.

David Clavedetscher, incidentally, presents himself in public, symbolically and probably for good reason, not as a hobby hunter; instead, an image circulates on the internet showing him as a businessman doing water sports. Conversely, David Clavadetscher could equally claim: «The term ‘hobby sailor’ was constructed by militant water protectors to disparage the demanding activity of sailors». How absurd.

David Clavadetscher and his association Jagd Schweiz are heavily involved in Crime of its members (hobby hunters). A new tactic of this militant association is: to silence fact-based criticism from peaceful citizens with arbitrary complaints.

Mr David Clavadetscher also personally contacts journalists who write objectively or negatively about hunting in an unpleasant manner, with muddled leaps of thought. As an ordinary citizen, one really needs a backbone not to succumb to the sometimes not merely subtle threats from the hobby hunters.

The killing of animals by the modern hobby hunter today results mainly from greed, profiteering, stupidity, pleasure, indifference, anger, envy, self-importance, showing off, boastfulness, jealousy, arrogance, ignorance, avarice, presumptuousness, egoism, resentment and a general contempt for living creatures.

In the modern environment, largely determined and shaped by humans, it is, according to renowned scientists, researchers, wildlife biologists and case studies, entirely possible and ethically responsible to leave wildlife populations to themselves. The canton of Geneva has known this modern wildlife management for over 40 years. What hundreds of hobby hunters used to do badly there is today carried out by a good dozen professional wildlife wardens, who intervene regulatorily when necessary and do not, on the basis of arbitrary hunting seasons and for the pleasure of killing, massacre fox, badger, birds and the like and inflict suffering.

Sanitary and therapeutic kills by the wildlife wardens are not the same as regulatory hunting based on the hunters' tall tales or the hobby hunters' misunderstood experience of nature.

For the hobby hunter, the welfare of the wild animal, which has an interest in continuing to live, is not the priority. For this reason, among others, hobby hunters should not be given a platform in schools with children and young people for their sectarian ideology. For the hobby hunters deliberately and very de013ndeed disguise and deceive the children. If one later does end up inside a hunting party, only then does the full extent of the whole abhorrent and cruel ideology and the often senseless deeds (fox hunting, trophy hunting at home and abroad, driven hunts, drive hunts, bird hunting, special hunts, trap hunting, earth hunting, hatred of predators, etc.) of the hobby hunters reveal itself, which then have to be acted out.

Killing for fun can and may never be a hobby – but rather a case for psychiatry.

For good reason, we also do not let paedophiles teach in schools, even though they could certainly deliver «demanding» achievements too. Both the paedophiles and the hobby hunters, however, have a disturbed relationship with the social norm. Both groups have always, in a thoroughly unchristian way, targeted the weakest members of society in order to recover, relax, be at one with their nature, and so on.