The same old hunting arguments fact-checked

Anyone who engages with hobby hunting on social media keeps encountering the same lines of defence.

They sound different, sometimes philosophical, sometimes indignant, sometimes statesmanlike, sometimes reverent. But on closer inspection a pattern emerges: at their core they are just a handful of arguments, and they fail on remarkably similar flaws in reasoning.

This article takes on the four most common ones, each in the form in which they actually circulate, and tests them against the facts. In the end it becomes clear why they belong together.

Argument 1: «I follow my predatory instinct, that's nature»

The first line of argument relocates the justification to biology. In essence: through evolution, humans carry a genetically anchored hunting or predatory instinct within them; without the hunting of our ancestors we would not exist at all; therefore hunting is something deeply human and not killing for pleasure.

The flaw in reasoning: from is to ought

This is a naturalistic fallacy. From what happens in nature or what was once vital for survival, nothing follows about what humans ought to do today. Illness, parasitism and the death of young animals are just as much «nature», without anyone declaring them to be commandments. The fact that hunting served survival in the Stone Age or in times of need provides no justification for killing today as a leisure activity.

It is telling that the defenders themselves are aware of the difference. In a typical variant it is said that the freezer is well stocked, that one does not need to make any kill at all, that one can wait until next week and not shoot if conditions are poor. This is precisely what refutes the instinct theory: what can be fully controlled by law, kill quota and free decision is not an instinct but a conscious choice. And a choice must be justified ethically, not excused with genes.

The second trick: the word «hunt»

Closely linked to this is a linguistic sleight of hand: «Even opponents of hunting hunt – for money, success, happiness.» Here «hunting» in the figurative sense (striving) is equated with «hunting» in the literal sense (killing an animal). Someone who strives for happiness kills no one. The equation is not an argument but a play on words that distracts from the actual point of contention.

The involuntary admission

In the end, the argument often refutes itself. When it is emphasised that hunting is a «passion», then precisely what the accusation means is admitted. Passion is a strong positive feeling associated with an activity. The dispute is never about whether «bloodlust» is felt in the moment of the shot, but about the fact that an entire leisure activity, at the centre of which stands killing, provides pleasure.

Argument 2: «‹Hobby hunter› is just an insult»

The second line revolves around the word itself. Why are priests without ordination not called «hobby Christians», volunteer politicians not «hobby politicians», untrained mothers not «hobby mothers»? «Hobby hunter» is said to be pure denigration, aimed at imputing unprofessionalism to the hunter.

The fallacy: the false analogy

All the comparative examples share one feature: they have no victim. Praying, volunteering, driving, raising children – these are activities that kill no one. Hunting differs precisely here. Moreover, the word «hobby» does not at all imply «you don't take it seriously»; that is a contrived straw man. It describes a state of affairs: an activity carried out voluntarily, in one's free time, and for one's own pleasure. Since no one today needs to hunt in order to feed themselves, all three features apply. The term is descriptively correct, not defamatory. Anyone who speaks of «hobby footballers» does not insult any athlete either.

Where professionalism really lies

The true difference is structural in nature, and it does indeed have to do with professionalism – only differently than the text suggests. A hobby hunter may be well trained and yet remains an amateur, because he acts voluntarily, without a mandate, and for pleasure. A professional game warden acts under state mandate, bound by instructions, monitored, accountable, and according to wildlife-biological criteria.

That this difference is measurable is borne out by the figures. In the canton of Grisons, around 3,836 animals were merely wounded over five years; in the follow-up searches the success rate was in some cases only 57 per cent, meaning that a considerable proportion of the wounded animals were never found and died in agony. And the direct efficiency comparison is drastic: a professional game warden in Geneva needs around 8 hours and a maximum of 2 cartridges for the sanitary kill of a wild boar, whereas a hobby hunter in the canton of Zurich needs 60 to 80 hours and up to 15 cartridges for the same kill. This is not a value judgement, it is a systemic difference.

The hunters' language: reinterpretation as a system

That the reinterpretation of terms is no coincidence of individual defenders is shown by the hunters' language itself. Over centuries a vocabulary of its own has developed that consistently obscures the act of killing: an animal is not killed but «taken»; it is not a living creature but a «piece»; its blood is called «sweat», its skin «cover», the sum of the dead animals the «bag». A roe deer shot in the belly with its entrails hanging out becomes a «wounded piece». This language does not name the suffering, it translates it into an odourless technical jargon. As in other sealed-off milieus, such a group language creates cohesion inwardly and distance outwardly, and above all it serves one purpose: it keeps at bay the feelings that would be unavoidable with the honest sentence «I have killed an animal.»

Argument 3: «State hunters would be more expensive and worse»

The third line is the state-political one. It runs: the territorial leasing system, proven over more than 150 years, rests on unpaid, voluntary commitment; a nationalisation of hunting would cost the taxpayer millions; and in any case «no state hunter, however well paid, would carry out the hunt more conscientiously» than the hobby hunter himself.

Why this is not voluntary work

The premise itself is wrong. An honorary office is an unpaid service for the benefit of others. Hobby hunting is the opposite: hobby hunters pay a lease or licence in order to be allowed to hunt, and in return they demand a service, namely the killing itself. Anyone who pays for access to their hobby is not performing compulsory labour but consuming a paid pleasure. The much-invoked “unpaid work” is therefore not selfless; it is the entrance fee for one's own hobby. Without the right to kill, this work would not exist at all. With that, the image of the selfless helper collapses in on itself, before one has even tallied the costs.

The bill that is never presented

The claim “we cost the state nothing” is a lie by omission. The external costs of hobby hunting are never accounted for. In Switzerland, around 20,000 wildlife accidents occur each year, with estimated insurance costs of around 76 million francs, borne through the comprehensive insurance premiums of all motorists. Hunting pressure increases the flight distance of animals and demonstrably aggravates these accidents. Hunting accidents account for around 300 recognised cases and some 3.6 million francs per year, financed through the accident premiums of all employees, and that is merely the lower limit, because retired hunters, the largest risk group, are missing from the statistics. The hunting administration of the canton of Zurich runs a deficit of around 600,000 francs annually.

Added to this are items that appear in no hunting balance sheet. Around half of Switzerland's forests are protection forest; the federal government, cantons and beneficiaries spend around 150 million francs each year on their upkeep, and a considerable part of that is attributable to browsing damage, which hunting pressure demonstrably aggravates rather than reduces. On top of that comes the environmental burden from lead-based ammunition, which contaminates soils, waters and the game meat itself.

And finally: that which cannot be expressed in francs: people die. This concerns not only the direct hunting accidents and the over 2,400 wildlife accidents involving personal injury that are registered annually in Germany alone. It also concerns a dimension for which, tellingly, there is no statistic: homicides involving hunting weapons. The official records do not break down weapons used in crimes according to whether they were hunting weapons, which is why no one knows the total number. What is well documented in criminological terms, however, is this: a firearm in the household significantly increases the risk of completed intimate-partner killings and suicides. Hunting weapons are among the largest groups of legally and privately stored firearms in the German-speaking region. The cases documented in the media, in which hobby hunters killed partners, family members or themselves with their legal weapon, are thus the visible tip of an unrecorded number. The fact that these deaths are nowhere recorded as consequential costs of private gun ownership is itself part of the problem. Anyone who speaks of a system that «costs nothing» is ignoring all of this.

Set against this is the Geneva model: since 1974, a few professional game wardens there have managed the wild animals entirely without hobby hunting, for around one million francs a year, including wildlife damage. That amounts to roughly a cup of coffee per inhabitant. Wildlife damage comparable, biodiversity higher: the brown hare reaches 17.7 animals per 100 hectares in Geneva, but only 1.0 in Zurich. The «too expensive» argument is thereby not merely reversed, it collapses: hobby hunting is not the cheap system, but the expensive one, whose bill is simply paid by someone else.

The fallacy: the enemy-of-the-constitution accusation

The most delicate part is the conclusion of the argument. Anyone who wants to change hunting law must «be asked whether they stand on the ground of our free and democratic legal order». This is factually wrong and rhetorically dangerous. Hunting law is simple statutory law; to change it by democratic majority is the normal case of democracy, not its opposite. Even the property that hobby hunters invoke is subject to the explicit reservation of social obligation (in Germany Art. 14 para. 2 of the Basic Law: «Property entails obligations»). Anyone who calls for a reform of the law is using the legal order, not attacking it. The same mechanism is shown by the frequently invoked GDR comparison: state-organised wild animal management exists today in numerous democracies; the reference to a totalitarian system is meant to discredit the proposal rather than refute it.

Argument 4: «Sportsmanship, the hunter honours the creature»

The fourth line is the quietest and most effective. It does without polemics and invokes a famous verse by Oskar von Riesenthal (1830 to 1898): «This is the hunter's badge of honour, that he protects and tends his game, hunts in a sportsmanlike manner, as is proper, honouring the Creator in the creature.» The defence goes: it is not the shot that comes first, but the protecting and tending; sportsmanship is an inner attitude of humility and reverence that respects game as living beings with intrinsic value.

The fallacy: the ideal as proof of the practice

The verse dates from the late 19th century, the heyday of bourgeois hunting romanticism. It describes an ideal, not a behaviour. But nothing about reality follows from the beauty of a self-image. One can justify any activity by reference to its noblest ideal; what matters is whether the practice corresponds to it. And it is precisely this question that the argument evades. The documented reality, that is, animals shot and never found, more than 1,000 reports per year in Grisons alone for misconduct by hobby hunters, the absence of blood-alcohol limits while hunting, stands in open contradiction to «protects and tends his game».

The reinterpretation of «tending»

Here too a fine-sounding word bears the burden. In the hunting context, «Hege» (cultivation/care) does not mean protection from death, but the maintenance of a huntable population, historically including feeding to increase numbers and the combating of competing predators. «Cultivating» and «protecting» are equated, yet they are the opposite: whoever cultivates manages the game for later killing, by, for example, also waging war on the predators.

The self-contradiction in the pathos

The rupture runs deepest in the celebrated closing line. Whoever recognises in the animal a living being with intrinsic value and a claim to reverence ought to conclude that it should not be killed for pleasure – not that it should be killed with particular reverence. The argument adopts the premise of animal ethics and draws the opposite conclusion. The religious charging obscures this contradiction with pathos instead of resolving it. And by declaring hunting ethics an «inner attitude», the debate shifts from verifiable behaviour to unverifiable conviction, which eludes any factual scrutiny. That there are hunters who sincerely mean this attitude changes nothing about the gap: a good conviction does not save the sentient animal from dying without necessity.

The fairy tale of healthy game meat

Hobby hunters and their associations persistently spread the image that game meat is the healthiest and most natural foodstuff of all. JagdSchweiz, for instance, writes on its website that roe deer, red deer and wild boar are «much healthier and more natural than any other meat». What sounds like a promise of quality is in truth a marketing argument with no scientific basis.

The reality looks different. Wild animals move through landscapes that are contaminated by traffic, industry, agriculture, PFAS chemicals, pesticides and heavy metals. No one knows exactly what the animals eat, which toxins they are exposed to, and how sick or contaminated animals are handled. An organic certification is structurally impossible for game meat: it is an uncontrolled natural product, not a controlled foodstuff.

A particularly serious problem is lead ammunition. When an animal is shot with lead-containing ammunition, the projectile breaks apart into numerous small fragments that disperse throughout the tissue and often cannot be completely removed even with careful trimming. Studies show average lead concentrations of around 5.2 ppm in the bodies of wild animals — roughly 14 times the previous EU assumptions. There is no safe threshold for lead: every intake is potentially harmful.

The Swiss Animal Welfare Federation STS had game meat products from domestic hobby hunting tested for their lead content: in 5 of 13 samples, lead was detected above the guideline value, and two samples exceeded the limit of 0.1 mg/kg applicable to slaughter animals by almost two and four times respectively. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) explicitly warns of an increased risk for people who eat game weekly, particularly in hobby hunter households, where, according to Swiss studies, up to 90 portions of game meat are consumed per year. According to the BfR, small children, pregnant women and women wishing to have children should avoid game shot with lead ammunition entirely.

In addition, there are zoonoses such as trichinosis, hepatitis E and salmonellosis, which can be transmitted through the consumption of raw or insufficiently cooked game meat. France's food authority ANSES recommends limiting the consumption of game meat to a maximum of three times a year, and advises pregnant women and children against it altogether.

Anyone who markets game meat as «organic», «healthy» or «natural» ignores these scientifically proven risks. This is not an opinion, it is lobbying.

The common pattern

When the four arguments are placed side by side, the same mechanisms emerge.

Firstly, the naturalistic fallacy: an ought is derived from instinct, prehistory or «that's how it has always been». Secondly, the reinterpretation of terms: «hunting» becomes a metaphor, «hobby» an alleged insult, «conservation» a synonym for protection, «voluntary work» for a paid hobby, so that the actual point of contention, voluntary killing, drops out of sight. In the hunters' jargon this reinterpretation has even become a fixed system that consistently translates the act of killing into technical terminology. Thirdly, the straw man: the other side is saddled with an accusation it never made («You're implying unprofessionalism», «Officials aren't allowed to have any fun»), so that it can be conveniently refuted. Fourthly, the flight into the ideal and into conviction: instead of verifiable practice, the pretty self-image (fair chase, reverence) is elevated to the standard, which cannot be refuted. And fifthly, increasingly, the delegitimisation of the criticism itself, going as far as the insinuation that anyone who questions hobby hunting stands outside the democratic order.

What is consistently missing is also striking: evidence. Where the defenders work with emotion, tradition and sweeping claims («nobody does it better than we do»), the other side has a documented body of facts, from the hit rate in Grisons through the Dutch E-Screener, in which around a fifth of the tested gun owners in the hobby hunter milieu failed to meet the minimum psychological standards, to the 50-year track record of the Geneva model.

The ever-recurring arguments are no coincidence, but a closed rhetorical repertoire. It is meant to make a leisure activity that kills wild animals appear as something natural, linguistically harmless, vital to the state and morally elevated. As soon as one untangles the terms and sets the figures alongside them, the question remains that all four arguments dodge: why, in a society with a secure food supply, should the killing of wild animals as a hobby still be justified, when professional wildlife management demonstrably works in a more animal-friendly, safer and cheaper way?

More on the individual points in our dossier on hunting, in particular on the full-cost accounting of hobby hunting, on the term hobby hunter, on the hunters' jargon, on the Game Wardens instead of Hunters initiative as well as on our documentation of Crime and hunting.