Hobby hunters begin 2025 in true form

A few headlines from the first week of January clearly document that recreational hunting does not work. Hobby hunters are neither well trained nor are they ethically and intellectually up to the mark, and they are careless in their use of weapons.

• Hobby hunter shoots another hobby hunter in a hunting blind
• Poaching and uncivilised hobby hunters: seven complaints and a flood of sanctions in the area around Cagliari
• Hobby hunters in Lower Saxony fear abolition of hunting
• Hobby hunter shoots a wild boar. But no, it was a pony!
• «Predator weeks» in Aukrug
• «Fox weeks» in Oelde: PETA sharply criticises the Hegering Oelde for senseless killings

Manipulation and falsehoods

It is particularly essential, especially in the context of recreational hunting and hobby hunters, that the public scrutinises matters very carefully. Nowhere is manipulation through falsehoods so rampant. Violence and lies are two sides of the same coin. For decades, recreational hunting has been nothing other than a permanently costly source of conflict for politicians, forestry, agriculture, administrations, the judiciary, health insurers, insurance companies, animal welfare organisations, environmental and nature conservation organisations, the police, federal authorities, the media, and so on.

Recreational hunting is not an honest trade. There are no standards, ethics, sound science, or rules in recreational hunting that can withstand social norms — not even within the hobby hunting community itself — and least of all animal welfare arguments.

Just as it is ethically wrong to decimate one wildlife species in order to protect another, the massacring cannot be right either. Over decades, unnaturally high ungulate populations have been bred for the benefit of hobby hunting. To now justify this with lame excuses about the absence of predators such as the fox, etc. — animals that are still being persecuted, particularly within hobby hunter circles — is simply despicable.

Hobby hunting as a catastrophic failure

Hobby hunting always represents a catastrophic failure of scientific competence and imagination. If the ecological mandate were truly taken seriously, the purpose of hobby hunting would be nothing other than making itself obsolete. The greatest joy for the hobby hunter would then be a self-regulating forest that spared them from having to pursue their unwelcome and bloody trade.

Hunting in order to decimate and massacre populations is, historically speaking, not hunting at all, but terroristic zoocide. The killing of wild animals by the modern hobby hunter today results primarily from greed, profiteering, pleasure, indifference, and contempt for the fate of animals. The true hunters of indigenous peoples would never have condoned such a thing.

Wildlife sanctuaries show the way

Wildlife biology studies demonstrate that animals living in a wildlife sanctuary lose much of their conditioned, unnatural wariness and, as a result, increasingly shift their unnatural nocturnal activity back into the daytime hours. This is also said to lead to fewer road accidents involving wildlife — what one can see, one generally does not run over. Wildlife behaves differently in daylight. Wildlife biologists such as Karl-Heinz Loske repeatedly report with great enthusiasm on developments in areas free from hobby hunting. One observes greater biodiversity, lower densities of huntable wildlife species, reduced damage, and fewer road accidents.

Experiences from various countries and regions show that wildlife populations in an intact wildlife sanctuary, protected from hobby hunters, largelyregulate themselves. Should regulatory intervention nevertheless become necessary, this must, from an animal welfare perspective, be carried out exclusively by professionally trained wildlife wardens who work in the field of contemporary wildlife management (animal welfare, safety, science, wildlife biology, etc.).

The introduction of ethical wildlife management will also ensure that there are as few hunting accidents as possible in the future. Domestic animals and livestock will no longer be killed by mistake. The safety of the public during leisure activities in forests and fields is once again guaranteed. Cruel hunting methods practiced “for fun” will also be a thing of the past. In this way, the state increasingly enables nature experiences with wildlife observation and promotes, as for example in Canton Geneva, biodiversity as well as the common good and the psychological well-being of the population.

The introduction of contemporary wildlife management is particularly desirable in densely populated areas, as it provides a strong guarantee of reduced stress (burnout, etc.) for wildlife. Wildlife that is less stressed also shows fewer signs of illness and behavioral disorders.

The wildlife populations of interest to hobby hunters have not been genuinely regulated for decades — they have been decimated while their birth rates are stimulated. A consequence of current methods is that grazing animals such as roe deer become even more skittish and shift their daily activities entirely into the night. This leads to many traffic accidents. Populations of wild boar, roe deer, red deer and the like have literally exploded and are out of control. This is no understanding of nature.

HOBBY HUNTER RADAR

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