Hobby hunting and murder: why the line between law and morality blurs

Is hobby hunting «murder»? This question cannot be answered in a single sentence, either legally or morally.

In legal terms, the concept is clearly defined and refers exclusively to the killing of human beings. In moral terms, by contrast, it is often used deliberately as a provocation in the animal rights debate, in order to highlight a sore point: animals are living creatures, not objects like a chair or an oven, but under current law they are not human beings either.

This in-between status is not a law of nature, but the result of a historical development. What today is regarded as legally self-evident was by no means always so. The status of women in law, too, has changed massively over the centuries; for a long time they were discriminated against, deprived of legal capacity or treated as inferior. This shows that the law is not absolute but changeable, and that it evolves under the pressure of ethics, science and social awareness.

Animals are not objects, but neither are they persons

In Switzerland, animals have been legally removed from pure object status. That was an important step, because animals were recognised as living creatures capable of sensation and suffering. Nevertheless, in many areas they remain tied in law to the logic of property and assets. It is precisely this tension that makes the debate so explosive.

Biologically, the closeness between humans and animals is undisputed. Many animal species share a large part of their DNA with us, and especially among higher mammals the kinship is obvious. This does not automatically entail full legal equality, but it certainly provides a strong ethical argument: anyone who acknowledges the capacity to suffer cannot treat animals as if they were dead objects.

How little this protection is worth in everyday life is shown by the summer of 2026: due to persistent drought, many Swiss alpine pastures lacked water and fodder, forcing farmers to bring their animals down to the valley early or have them emergency-slaughtered. Not even a basic need such as water is reliably guaranteed for animals in acute emergencies. The legal protection exists on paper, but as soon as conditions deteriorate, it becomes clear how little it holds up in practice.

Even more fundamental is the sheer scale of the killing. Every year in Switzerland, over 85 million animals are slaughtered for meat production, the majority of them poultry. If that many people were systematically killed, it would be called one of the greatest crimes in history. With animals we call it agriculture, and no one is held accountable for it.

Animals have character

Behavioural biology research describes stable individual differences in numerous animal species, recurring across courage, shyness, curiosity, aggressiveness and caution, similar to what is regarded as personality in humans. Such patterns are documented not only in mammals but also in birds, fish and insects. A categorical divide between humans and animals can hardly be justified on this basis, at most a gradual difference in the degree of self-reflection.

Hobby hunting is not just a nature topic

Hobby hunting is often portrayed as husbandry, care or necessary wildlife management. Yet it is always also a system of killing. And it is not without risk: time and again, people too are harmed or even die in hunting accidents, as the Crime and Hunting section of wildbeimwild.com documents with numerous cases. Hobby hunting is therefore not merely a romanticised form of connection with nature, but a practice with real consequences for animals and humans.

Those who defend hobby hunting usually argue with regulation, protecting the forest, or wildlife damage. Critics counter that the killing itself does not become a morally neutral act simply because it is legal. This is precisely where the difference between law and ethics becomes visible: legal does not automatically mean legitimate.

The canton of Geneva shows that things can be done differently. Private hunting has been banned there since 1974. The management of non-human animals, observation, and necessary interventions have since rested with state environmental wardens, not with private hunters. There it is not about personal hunting pleasure, hunting grounds, or trophies, but about expertly controlled measures in which prevention comes before the shot. Geneva thus proves that the regulation of non-human animals also works entirely without hobby hunting.

Religions recognise fellow creaturehood

Religious traditions also provide strong counterarguments against the trivialisation of animal suffering. In Jainism, non-violence towards all living beings is central. In Hinduism, respect for life likewise plays a major role, often linked to vegetarian practice and the idea of Ahimsa. In Christianity there is also a long tradition of mercy towards creation, even if this is not always expressed in the form of an absolute prohibition on killing.

Similarly, other religions too recognise rules that reject unnecessary animal suffering or permit killing only under strict conditions. The common denominator is clear: animals are not arbitrary objects, but fellow creatures deserving of respect. The phrase «our brothers and sisters» is therefore more spiritual than legal, but ethically very powerful.

According to the surviving historical accounts, the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish group of antiquity, also very probably lived without meat. Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus described the Essenes in the 1st century as a community with a particularly pure, abstinent way of life. As they rejected the bloody animal sacrifice cult in the Temple of Jerusalem, they consequently also abstained from meat, as was customary in the ancient Mediterranean world. Later authors such as Porphyry and Jerome explicitly recorded this. According to Josephus, violations of the rules could lead to exclusion from the community, as was common among many ancient associations at the time. Considerably more concrete and still alive today is the animal welfare of the Bishnoi in Rajasthan: the community, founded around 500 years ago, fundamentally kills no animals and actively pursues poachers. In 1998, Bishnoi animal welfare activists, after a chase, apprehended a well-known Bollywood actor who had killed protected antelopes. The case ended up in court.

In many indigenous North American traditions, too, a clear dividing line applies: hunting out of necessity, bound up with ritual and respect for the animal, is something different from killing for pure pleasure. The Lakota leader Sitting Bull is attributed, in essence, with the statement that his own people killed buffalo for food and clothing, while the young men of the white settlers shot for pleasure. It is precisely this distinction — necessity versus pleasure — that remains to this day the moral core of the criticism of hobby hunting.

Activism, too, speaks in pointed terms

It is interesting that even animal rights organisations speak of «murder» in their campaigns when animals are killed. The term actually comes from criminal law and describes a killing under particularly reprehensible circumstances, for example out of cruelty, treachery or greed. In animal welfare criminal law no comparable gradation exists, even though the same features would often apply: if an animal is killed out of pure pursuit of profit, this would be a defining feature of murder in the case of a human being, whereas with animals economic benefit may, under certain circumstances, even be discussed as a justification. The law here recognises only the standard of the «reasonable ground». The language of the animal rights organisations therefore aims less at a criminal-law equation than at the question of why the same killing features are assessed so differently in humans and animals.

One can criticise this choice of words without denying its political core. It points to the same fundamental conflict: if animals feel, suffer and form social relationships, why should they then be treated legally and morally as if they were mere things?

A law in transition

History shows that law is repeatedly revised. In earlier times it was taken for granted that women were massively disadvantaged legally and socially. In earlier times animals were indeed regarded in many places as mere things. Today neither is any longer tenable, at least not without contradiction.

That is precisely why the question of hobby hunting, animal welfare and animal ethics is more than a matter of taste. It concerns the relationship between power and compassion, between tradition and progress, between legal practice and moral responsibility. Anyone who takes animals seriously as living beings will find it hard to continue treating them like objects.

Yet legal progress often remains without consequence for the individual animal as long as nothing changes in practice. Leonardo da Vinci already captured this contradiction with the prediction that one day the killing of animals would be regarded with the same eyes as the murder of human beings. Just because a roe deer is no longer a thing on paper, that does not by any means make it protected as an animal itself.

The honest answer is therefore: hobby hunting is not legally murder, but for many people it is morally certainly associated with killing and violence. This distinction is important and must not be watered down: those who rightly criticise hobby hunting gain credibility when the criticism remains legally sound. Examples such as Geneva also show that an alternative to hobby hunting in dealing with non-human animals is not only conceivable, but already established practice.

Animals are no longer things, but not yet persons either. And precisely because law changes, the debate is not closed but open.

The real dispute is not only about hobby hunting, but about the question of whether the capacity to suffer must have moral consequences. Anyone who answers this question with yes can hardly avoid the realisation: animals are fellow creatures, not means to an end.