Recreational hunters and silencers: a no-go

While Switzerland debates the value of peace, ethics and responsibility on a daily basis, recreational hunters are pushing for technical aids intended to make killing in the forest even less conspicuous.

Silencers, already permitted in some countries, are banned here for good reason. Yet the recreational hunting lobby is not giving up.

Silencers are supposedly meant to protect recreational hunters' hearing and improve precision. In reality, their main purpose is to make shots quieter and thus harder to control. Game warden and supervisory bodies face a problem: who will hear where a shot was fired in the forest if there is no bang?

The fear of Poaching is justified. An almost silent shot makes tracking more difficult and opens the door to abuse. Control over hunting activity would decline further—in a country where numerous violations of hunting and animal welfare laws are already recorded every year.

Technology is no substitute for a sense of responsibility

The recreational hunting is often romanticised by its supporters as tradition or a contribution to nature conservation. Yet reality paints a different picture: an ageing recreational hunting community, inadequate training, missed shots and animal suffering.

A silencer does not turn a poor marksman into a better one. It merely changes the acoustic perception of the suffering caused by the bullet. And that is precisely the problem: the quieter the shots, the quieter the conscience becomes.

Risk to humans and animals

Not only Wild animals, but also walkers, riders and families are at risk. When shots are barely audible, the risk of accidents increases. At the same time, animals lose the chance to flee at the sound of the bang, becoming unwitting targets.

The supposed progress is in truth a step backwards in terms of ethics and safety.

Animal welfare instead of a fetish for technology

Animal welfare advocates have been demanding for years that wildlife management should only be carried out by professional game wardens and specialists with clear oversight, as in the canton of Geneva. Those who are truly interested in animal welfare should not be talking about silencers, but about alternatives to recreational hunting.

Because nature does not need armed recreational activists, but respect, protection and retreat spaces. recreational hunting is not a hobby, it is an intervention in the lives of other living beings.

A clear no to silent recreational hunting

Switzerland does not need quieter weapons, but louder voices for animal welfare. Silencers are not progress, but another tool to conceal the suffering of animals. The silence they create is not the calm of nature, it is the silence surrounding unnecessary killing.

It is not that silencers make the weapon more accurate per se, but according to recreational hunters, they are supposedly meant to make it easier to shoot the weapon more accurately. However, silencers also throw off the balance of the rifle, for example, which does not lead to greater accuracy. A silencer does not increase the chances on the first shot; it improves the prospects for the second shot, should the first shot not hit properly and the wild animals not be startled, or when the recreational hunter wants to shoot further wild animals on the spot undisturbed in succession. Silencers primarily serve the killer and not animal welfare.

Every shot fired by recreational hunters disturbs the entire habitat for many kilometres. Everyone is confronted with negative energy. According to numerous studies, the product game meat is unhealthy. Processed game meat is carcinogenic, like cigarettes, asbestos or arsenic, warns the World Health Organization WHO.

Fellow human beings are also afflicted psychologically by the noise and recreational hunting. The Grisons recreational hunting community in particular is a prime example of a lack of moral and ethical hygiene. Every year there are around a thousand reports and fines, because Grisons recreational hunters violate hunting acts, weapons legislation, environmental legislation, animal welfare legislation and shooting accuracy requirements. The poorly conducted hunting practices and the lack of character within the recreational hunting community are extensively documented.

Fair chase with technical aids?

With silencers, recreational hunters will become even harder to control. How are game wardens, hunting supervisors and other monitoring bodies supposed to correctly identify a barely audible discharge? This means the many missed shots by recreational hunters can be reported even less often.Animal cruelty the floodgates are opened. Ordinary people are put at additional risk, because recreational hunters are permitted to hunt some wild animal or other practically all year round, not only in Grisons. Wild animals, too, have fewer chances, as they are no longer startled by the furtive shots.

Anyone who is not a successful recreational hunter without technical aids will not become one with a silencer either.

Animal welfare advocates are firmly convinced that technical aids such as silencers belong solely in the hands of well-trained game wardens, as is the case in the canton of Geneva!

Recreational hunters who cannot tolerate recoil or are sensitive to noise should find themselves a quieter hobby. There is neither a need nor any legal possibility, under Art. 3 JSV, for silencers to be generally approved for hunting purposes.

Furthermore, the recreational hunting community should vote YES on the initiative for «restricting fireworks» if it is truly concerned about animal welfare.

Addendum: Silencers have been permitted in recreational hunting since 2025

This article describes the legal situation at the time of its initial publication. With the revised Hunting Ordinance, the Federal Council removed the silencer from the list of aids prohibited for hunting (Art. 2 JSV) as of 1 February 2025. Since then, no special hunting-law exemption is required for its use in recreational hunting. Under weapons law, however, the silencer remains prohibited accessory equipment: acquiring one still requires an exemption permit from the canton of residence. The cantons have adapted their hunting regulations accordingly, Grisons for instance updating its hunting operating regulations in 2025.

In Grisons, by the end of June 2025 only 610 recreational hunters had submitted an application (Surprisingly few recreational hunters apply for silencers). The new legal situation changes nothing about the criticism voiced by IG Wild beim Wild: quieter shots make it harder for game wardens and hunting supervisors to locate shots and monitor hunting activity.

In the view of IG Wild beim Wild, recreational hunters require annual medical-psychological fitness assessments modelled on the Netherlands, as well as a binding upper age limit. Today, the largest age group among recreational hunters is 65+. Within this group, age-related limitations such as declining eyesight, slower reaction times, reduced concentration and cognitive deficits increase significantly, statistically speaking. At the same time, accident analyses show that the number of serious hunting accidents involving injuries and fatalities rises significantly from middle age onwards.

The regular reports of hunting accidents, fatal mistakes and the misuse of hunting weapons highlight a structural problem. Private ownership and use of lethal firearms for leisure purposes largely escapes continuous oversight. In the view of IG Wild beim Wild, this is no longer justifiable. A practice based on voluntary killing, which at the same time poses considerable risks to people and animals, loses its societal legitimacy.

Hobby Hunting is also based on speciesism. Speciesism describes the systematic devaluation of non-human animals purely on the basis of their species. It is comparable to racism or sexism and cannot be justified either culturally or ethically. Tradition is no substitute for moral scrutiny.

Critical scrutiny is particularly essential in the field of recreational hunting. Hardly any other area is so shaped by sugar-coated narratives, half-truths and targeted disinformation. Where violence is normalised, narratives often serve to justify it. Transparency, verifiable facts and an open societal debate are therefore indispensable.