Recreational hunters create a “Landscape of Fear”
Recreational hunters alter the migrations and habits of wildlife just as predators do. They create a “Landscape of Fear”.
Negative impact on migrations and habits
Recreational hunters have a strong negative impact on the migrations and habits of wildlife.
Observational findings show that recreational hunters, like other predators, frequently create a “Landscape of Fear” and, by their mere presence, drastically alter how animals use a given area.
Both predators and prey alter their locations and activity times in certain areas when recreational hunters are present. Some wildlife abandon areas they had previously used entirely, others visited them less frequently, and yet others shifted to nocturnal activity in order to avoid recreational hunters.
Social structures are destroyed
The stress and manipulation that recreational hunting exerts on animals throughout the year significantly impairs wildlife’s ability to feed in peace and quiet, maintain normal social behaviour, move freely, and adjust their population to available resources. Recreational hunting fails as population control.
Today’s recreational hunting destroys the normal social coexistence of wildlife, the ecological balance, natural behavioural patterns, family structures and social bonds, and leads to increased dispersal into unhunted residential areas and unnatural concentrations of animals in forests and even in cities.
Small-game hunting is not necessary
Even without hunting, there would not suddenly be too many foxes, hares or birds. Experience shows that nature can be left to its own devices. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, small-game hunting is not necessary.
Heinrich Haller, former National Park Director and wildlife biologist
Hunting is not about extensive biodiversity or the protection of individual wildlife, but about money and pleasure. The Geneva Model has shown since 1974 that professional wildlife management works without recreational hunters.
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More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. 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.
