Hobby Hunting: A Quick Licence to Kill Instead of Knowledge

Anyone who, by contrast, wishes to understand those same animals scientifically will study biology for years and must work their way through exams, seminars and field research.

This already reveals a fundamental imbalance: it is possible to legally kill animals more quickly than it is to acquire substantive knowledge about their lives, their suffering and their ecological role.

When one compares this reality with the training of police officers and military personnel, hobby hunting appears even more absurd. For state-authorised weapons carriers, society accepts high hurdles and lengthy training pathways. For hobby hunters who roam forests unsupervised with live-ammunition weapons, a short course with multiple-choice questions and shooting tests that do not merit the name is deemed sufficient.

Hunting Training in Months: The Quick Licence to Kill

In many cases, hunting training is tailored to speed and exam readiness. Whether a classic evening and weekend course spread over several months or a compact intensive course: the focus is on ensuring that participants pass the exam.

The written section consists of multiple-choice sheets with fixed question catalogues. These are supplemented by a practical shooting test and an oral-practical component in which weapon handling, hunting practice and some legal knowledge are assessed. Those who tick enough boxes correctly and are permitted to keep shooting at the range until they hit the target will ultimately receive the coveted plastic card.

The content is dominated by a utilitarian perspective. Wild animals appear as a population to be «regulated», as a resource to be «husband» and simultaneously hunted. The focus is on accuracy, territory organization, and legal provisions to memorize for the examination. In-depth ecology, behavioral biology, population dynamics, or animal welfare ethics remain peripheral topics, if they appear at all.

The threshold for legally shooting an animal is thus alarmingly low. A manageable period of preparation, a few examinations, a fee paid to the authorities — and the way into the hunting ground is open.

Police and Military: Years of Training, Constant Oversight

The situation is entirely different for police and military personnel. Anyone wishing to become a police officer undergoes two and a half to three years of training or a full-time bachelor's degree program. This includes law, operational doctrine, shooting and tactical training, de-escalation strategies, psychological content, physical training, stress scenarios, and ongoing assessments. Mistakes and misconduct, including a prohibition on alcohol during duty, can have disciplinary and criminal consequences.

Soldiers also complete basic training lasting several months, followed by specialist and tactical instruction. The handling of weapons is embedded in chains of command, rules of engagement, and military disciplinary law.

Both have in common:

• Selection procedures that assess, at least broadly, physical and psychological fitness
• training that lasts considerably longer than a hunting course
• continuous integration into hierarchies and oversight structures
• the ability to sanction misconduct

Society rightly accepts that the state does not send people out into public with firearms after a weekend course to exercise the monopoly on violence. Yet when it comes to wildlife and hobby hunters, this logic appears to play no role — even though they cause harm on an hourly basis.

Knowledge Versus Power: Those Who Understand Do Not Decide

The IG Wild beim Wild has been pointing out a contradiction for years: anyone who seriously wishes to understand animals and ecosystems requires a lengthy scientific degree encompassing lectures, seminars, laboratory work, and field research. This involves ecology, animal behavior, population dynamics, genetics, conservation biology, and statistics. Such knowledge is not acquired over a few weekends in a classroom, but over many years.

Nevertheless, in hunting practice it is not the biologists, ecologists, or animal welfare experts who have the final say over culling plans and hunting regulations, but people whose formal «training» in dealing with wild animals was completed in a matter of months.

Whoever goes into the forest with a rifle decides directly over the life and death of individual animals. Whoever points out, on a scientifically sound basis, the flaws in hunting practice, is instead readily defamed as a «theoretical armchair perpetrator» and pushed out of debates.

This creates a grotesque situation:

• The licence to carry out lethal intervention has a low threshold and can be obtained with manageable effort.
• The social recognition for those who work with data, models, and facts is high-threshold and fragile.

At its core, this is wrong. A responsible society would have to organize it in exactly the opposite way.

Psychology and Age: Where No One Looks Too Closely

In the context of the state monopoly on violence, psychological fitness, stress resilience, and the risk of being overwhelmed are repeatedly discussed. For hobby hunters, this area remains largely in the dark. Yet the risk situation is obvious: people with private access to loaded firearms, moving unsupervised through fields and forests, alongside families, walkers, joggers, horse riders, and of course the wild animals themselves.

The IG Wild beim Wild therefore demands at minimum annual medical-psychological assessments for hobby hunters, modelled on the Netherlands, as well as an upper age limit. The largest age group among hobby hunters consists of older people, frequently 65 and above — that is, those in whom vision, reaction speed, concentration, and mobility statistically decline significantly. From around the age of 45, accident figures for both humans and animals rise dramatically.

While in the police and military, physical fitness is regularly reviewed and individuals must leave service when they no longer meet the requirements, hobby hunters can often continue for decades without any renewed fitness assessment. The weapon remains in the cupboard, the hunting licence in the wallet, even when the actual ability to shoot safely and recognise hazards has long since ceased to exist.

Moral Distortion: Animals as Objects, Tradition as an Excuse

The rapid issuance of hunting licenses sends a clear social signal. Intervention in wildlife populations is presented as something normal and almost self-evident. Hunting associations tell the simple story of stewardship and care, of noble tradition and alleged service to the forest.

Modern ecology paints a different picture. Ecosystems are complex networks in which every «regulation» has side effects that often only become visible years later. Habitat loss, agriculture, traffic, and the climate crisis are the central drivers of population trends — not the myth of «excessive wildlife populations» that hobby hunters are so fond of repeating.

From an animal welfare perspective, the situation is even clearer. Anyone who engages deeply with animal behavior, stress, and the capacity to suffer can no longer view wildlife as anonymous «pieces» in a hunting report. This very knowledge is absent from many hunting debates. Instead, buzzwords such as «hunting-appropriate killing,» efficiency, and kill counts dominate. Empathy is regarded as a disruption to hunting operations.

Hobby hunters embody a pronounced speciesism. The suffering of wild animals is given less weight than tradition, leisure enjoyment, or the sense of power over life and death. Speciesism thus belongs in the same category as racism and sexism — not with «culture» or «tradition.»

Consequence: Abolition of hobby hunting or minimum standards comparable to those required of police officers

When the state allows people to take up hobby hunting within a few months, yet simultaneously demands years of training before someone may scientifically research animals, it is setting the wrong priorities. Anyone wishing to intervene in ecosystems with weapons should know at least as much about those systems as those who study them professionally.

The minimum demands must include:

• Significantly longer and more professionally rigorous training for all who wish to obtain a hunting license
• Mandatory, recurring medical and psychological fitness assessments
• Strict alignment of hunting decisions with independent scientific standards rather than lobbying interests

Anyone who is honest, however, arrives at a different conclusion: there is no convincing reason why private hobby hunters should be roaming forests heavily armed in the first place. Wildlife needs professional, independent game wardens with scientific and animal welfare-oriented training — not recreational shooters with a weekend course.

The ever-increasing reports of hunting accidents, killed dogs, people shot, and criminal offences involving hunters' weapons illustrate how dangerous this constellation is. At the same time, countless wild animals suffer in the shadow of a system that facilitates killing and impedes understanding.

The decisive question is therefore not how hobby hunting can be «improved» slightly. The question is how long we are willing to tolerate, in the name of tradition, a model based on violence, speciesism, and the systematic disregard for knowledge.

The answer of IG Wild beim Wild is clear: hobby hunting must be abolished.