"Hobby hunters are part of the solution"? Lobby PR fact-checked

The occasion is an article from the Italian hunting portal Caccia Passione dated 22 May 2026.

He invokes the so-called "Biodiversity Manifesto" and cites over 550 conservation projects by European hunters as evidence. Yet anyone who looks closely will recognise a familiar pattern: the lobby is grading its own homework.

A lobby grading its own homework

The manifesto cited comes from FACE, the European umbrella organisation of hunting associations based in Brussels. It is a self-maintained project database which, by the association's own account, it runs in support of its lobbying work in Brussels. Those who submit the projects also select them, and no one verifies them independently. These are not independent, peer-reviewed evidence of impact, but rather the self-promotion of an interest group that, among other things, opposes the EU ban on lead-based ammunition. A figure such as "550 projects" sounds impressive, but says as little about ecological impact as the number of press releases an association sends out.

In most cantons there isn't even a hunting ground

The image of the hobby hunter as "guardian of the landscape" presupposes that they tend an area on a lasting basis. In Switzerland, however, hunting law is a cantonal sovereign right (the hunting regalia), and land ownership confers no hunting rights. In 16 of the 26 cantons, licence hunting applies: anyone who obtains a licence may shoot throughout the canton, without a leased hunting ground and without any associated duty of care. Only in nine territorial-hunting cantons is land leased at all to hunting associations; only Geneva has state-run hunting by wildlife wardens. For the majority of Swiss hobby hunters, then, there is no "own land" at all that they could enhance. The PR brush paints a relationship of stewardship that, under Switzerland's most widespread hunting system, does not legally exist.

The record tells a different story

After decades of hunters' "stewardship", about one third of the species studied in Switzerland are classified as endangered. And wherever conservation is meant to make concrete progress, the hobby hunting lobby regularly mobilises against it: against the Biodiversity Initiative, against new national parks such as Adula or the Locarnese, and against the ban on lead-based ammunition. The Ticino hunting association FCTI, for instance, fought against several of these proposals at once. Those who block protected areas and obstruct protective measures are not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

Geneva shows it can be done without

The canton of Geneva abolished private hunting in 1974 by popular vote and replaced it with state-employed game wardens. Despite a high population density and strong urbanisation, Geneva today is among the most species-rich cantons in Switzerland. This is not an untransferable exception, but a working model: wildlife regulation by professionals and by predators such as wolf, lynx and fox, instead of by a leisure pastime. Genuine stewardship needs a handful of professionals, not an army of recreational shooters.

The promise "hobby hunters are part of the solution" already fails at its own source: it is based on a lobby database, not on independent science. Biodiversity in Switzerland wins where civil society and authorities take action, and it loses where the hobby hunting lobby blocks. The next celebratory PR is sure to follow, and so is the next fact check.