Recreational hunters and their enjoyment of animal cruelty
According to a whistleblower report, a recreational hunter in the Rhein-Lahn district repeatedly set his “hunting dog” on an injured wild boar during a tracking hunt in December 2023.
Recreational hunter sets dog on wild boar
A video also submitted to PETA shows how the recreational hunter repeatedly urges his hunting dog to bite the animal with the commands «pack sie» and «voran».
The dog manages to inflict numerous bites on the wild boar. According to the report, this animal cruelty is not an isolated incident; this behaviour on the part of the recreational hunter in question is already known in hunting circles.
PETA files criminal complaint
The animal rights organisation subsequently filed a criminal complaint in February with the Koblenz public prosecutor’s office for violation of the Animal Welfare Act and informed the hunting authority of the Rhein-Lahn district about the matter.
PETA is demanding that the responsible party’s firearms licence and hunting licence be revoked. On the occasion of this incident, the animal rights organisation is also once again calling on the federal government to initiate a ban on recreational hunting .
«The sad video from Rhineland-Palatinate once again confirms what eyewitnesses keep telling us: Even the existing weak regulations for “humane” killing are often not adhered to in recreational hunting due to the lack of oversight in the forest. Because hunting laws have barely been revised for decades due to resistance from recreational hunters, many forms of animal cruelty are even completely legal, such as trap hunting, earth hunting, and the training of hunting dogs on live foxes in so-called artificial earths. The only way to comprehensively protect wildlife from cruel abuse is a ban on recreational hunting by the federal government.»
Peter Höffken, policy advisor at PETA.
Recreational hunting counterproductive according to experts
Recognized wildlife biologists agree that there is no ecological necessity for recreational hunting. According to renowned biologist Prof. Dr. Josef H. Reichholf, natural regulation of wildlife populations living in forests occurs through environmental factors such as weather, food availability, and disease.
English experts also concluded that fox populations, for example, regulate themselves based on food availability and social factors.
With wild boar, recreational hunting destroys the age and social structures of animal populations, which leads to increased reproduction among survivors.
Losses in the population are thus quickly offset or even overcompensated by offspring and migration. The approximately 400’000 recreational hunters in Germany are matched by only around 1’000 professional hunters, primarily forestry officials.
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.
