How Berlin and Bern are authorizing the shooting of wolves

Germany is in a hurry to move the wolf from protected species status into the rifle barrels of hobby hunters.

With the inclusion of the wolf in the Federal Hunting Act and a new hunting season from July 1st to October 31st, a predator that was only recently downgraded at the European level is being demoted to a "manageable population" in record time – and the farmers' and hunting lobbies are celebrating. What is being sold as "rational population management" is in reality a political wish list at the expense of a still vulnerable returning species of European fauna – and a blueprint for how to systematically undermine species conservation.

Wolf hunting season: political wishful thinking instead of ecological necessity

The mechanism is simple: The federal government declares the wolf a "favorably preserved" population in large parts of Germany, requires the states to draw up management plans , and thus opens a regular hunting season from July 1st to October 31st. Officially, this is supposed to apply only where "high wolf numbers" allegedly cause problems; in reality, it means that states with strong lobbying power are given almost free rein to define culling quotas. While the wolf is formally still listed as protected, in practice it is forced into the same logic as deer or roe deer: Those who cause a disturbance are "regulated"—and those who regulate are, as always, recreational hunters .

In Switzerland, precisely this logic was already introduced with the revision of hunting law , only without using the term "hunting season": Since 2023/24, preventive and reactive "regulations" have allowed cantons to shoot individual members and entire packs, as long as a politically defined minimum number of packs remains on paper. The label differs – "regulation" instead of "hunting season" – but the result is the same: The wolf is transformed from a once strictly protected species into a relic in the land-use regime of an industrialized cultural landscape.

Switzerland vs. Germany: two systems, one agenda

At first glance, the systems appear different: Germany introduces a traditional hunting season, while Switzerland speaks of preventive and reactive regulation. But the crucial question is not what the child is called, but who ultimately shoots it and according to what political logic.

Germany:

• Hunting season: July 1 to October 31; hunting in regions with "high populations" and "favorable conservation status". On March 5, 2026, the Bundestag passed legislation to include the wolf in the Federal Hunting Act with votes from the CDU/CSU, AfD, and SPD. The Bundesrat approved the legislation on March 27, 2026 .
• States are to create cross-regional management plans to "contain" the populations. Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Schleswig-Holstein are already working on such plans .
• In addition, special rules apply to alpine and pasture areas, where herd protection is declared "unacceptable" and shooting is made easier – even in unfavorable conservation conditions.

Switzerland:

• Preventive regulation from September 1st to January 31st; reactive regulation from June 1st to August 31st at defined damage thresholds.
• The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) approves cantonal applications; entire packs or large parts thereof can be authorized for removal. In the 2024/25 period , the FOEN authorized the culling of approximately 125 wolves , 92 of which were killed preventively.
• The fact that the "rapid growth" of the wolf population has been slowed is being touted as a success – with a pack count of 36 packs and around 320 confirmed wolves.

Both systems follow the same agenda: the focus is no longer on the reintroduction of a once-extinct species, but on cementing a livestock system that relies on free ecosystem services provided by nature and treats every predator as a nuisance. Where the hunting lobby speaks of "wildlife management," it is in reality about maintaining power in a hobby that kills hundreds of thousands of wild animals in forests and fields every year without any real necessity.

Further reading: Dossier «Wolf in Switzerland: Facts, politics and the limits of hunting»

Politics allows targeted shooting of wolf pups

While the lobby publicly speaks of "rational population management," the legislature's precision strike is in reality aimed at wolf pups, the youngest and most vulnerable members of the pack. In Switzerland, this is cynically called "preventive regulation": The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) authorizes cantons to shoot up to half or even two-thirds of a pack's pups this year, officially to prevent conflicts from arising in the first place. The regulation periods are structured so that primarily young animals are affected, even though the FOEN itself acknowledges that distinguishing between pups and adults in the field is difficult – with the result that in the 2024/25 period, two adult wolves and three lynxes, and in the previous period, a livestock guardian dog, were "accidentally" killed.

Germany is now copying this pattern almost perfectly: The new hunting season, from July 1st to October 31st, falls precisely during the period when wolf pups are still being nursed and socialized by their parents. The German Animal Welfare Federation explicitly warns that this means "wolf pups and parent animals will be targeted from summer onwards" and that blanket culls of young wolves will be permitted as soon as the politically manipulated "favorable conservation status" is declared.

The German Hunting Association (DJV) is openly celebrating : This regulation enables "classic population management based on interventions in the juvenile class"—40 percent of the annual offspring are to be killed. In an official statement before the Bundestag, the DJV explicitly demands that "up to 40% of the young wolves of a given year" be shot—precisely what Swiss regulatory practice already enacts. Behind the facade of "coexistence" and "security," both countries are thus pursuing a policy that systematically attacks packs at their core and degrades the wolf to an arbitrarily controllable residual element in the recreational hunting system.

Further reading: «Germany: Wolf pups in the sights of politicians»

The “favorable state of preservation” as a political catch-all term

The key lever for legally legitimizing culls in both countries is called "favorable conservation status." What sounds like a strict, technical category functions in practice as a political catch-all term: governments report to Brussels that the wolf is "doing well," while simultaneously introducing new culling measures.

At the EU level, the wolf's status under the Bern Convention was downgraded from "strictly protected" to "protected" on December 6, 2024 – the change entered into force on March 7, 2025. In June 2025 , Directive (EU) 2025/1237 followed, moving the wolf from Annex IV (strictly protected) to Annex V (harvesting and utilization permitted) in the Habitats Directive. Germany uses this as justification for including the wolf in its Federal Hunting Act and introducing hunting seasons. Switzerland, in its Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) report, notes with satisfaction that the rapid growth of the wolf population has been slowed, thus indicating that further regulation is politically desirable and will be consolidated.

Instead of transparently stating, "We want to keep the wolf population in check in the interest of the agricultural lobby," politicians and authorities hide behind technocratic terminology. The WWF warns that the wolf's conservation status under the Habitats Directive criteria is still not considered "favorable," yet it is being gradually reduced to a negotiable target whose right to exist is "defined" anew each year by shotguns and bullets.

Further reading: «One year after the downgrade: The wolf loses its protection»

Figures from Switzerland: Livestock protection works – not the finger on the trigger.

The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) report on the 2023/24 and 2024/25 regulation periods reveals an uncomfortable truth for the hunting lobby: The number of livestock kills has decreased again after peaking in 2022, even though the number of packs has continued to increase or stabilize. Nevertheless, a total of approximately 147 wolves were killed during the two periods (55 in 2023/24, 92 in 2024/25), and several entire packs were eradicated – yet the FOEN cautiously speaks only of a slowed growth dynamic, not of a "country overrun" with wolves.

The report's key finding is: "Effective livestock protection is a crucial component of wolf management and helps prevent damage to farm animals." In other words: fences, livestock guardian dogs, and adapted farming practices – all of these have a measurable impact. The WWF pointed out that shooting dominant wolves can lead to unstable packs, causing young wolves to increasingly prey on more readily available livestock – thus, indiscriminate recreational hunting exacerbates the very problems it purports to solve. Even in Germany , the number of attacks on livestock fell by 25 percent in 2024 , despite the continued growth of the wolf population – clear evidence that livestock protection works .

Anyone claiming today that wolves must be hunted so that livestock farmers can "sleep peacefully again" is deliberately ignoring the available data and exploiting a scapegoat that is politically easier to market than fair prices, working conditions, and subsidy reforms in the livestock sector. As NABU NRW aptly puts it : "The blanket hunting of wolves is pure symbolic politics and creates no security for livestock farmers." Over 151,000 people have already signed the NABU petition "Herd protection instead of wolf hunting."

Further reading: Dossier «Wolf in Switzerland: Facts, politics and the limits of hunting»

What remains: Hobby hunting as a disruptive factor in coexistence

Ultimately, the comparison between Germany and Switzerland leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: the problem is not the wolf, but a politically protected system of recreational hunting and extensive livestock farming that views any form of predator as an attack on long-standing privileges. In both countries, the hunting and farming lobbies are courted by promises to reduce "wolf pressure" through the use of lead – even though their own expert agencies demonstrate that livestock protection and management planning are the real keys.

Anyone who seriously wants to talk about coexistence must have the courage to name precisely these power structures: the hunting rights over wild animals, which have been declared a sacred cow by politicians, and an agricultural model that cannot survive in the long run without radical changes. As long as wolf policy in Berlin, Bern, and Brussels means opening new hunting windows instead of securing habitats, protecting livestock, and ensuring a fair economy, the term "species conservation" remains a fig leaf – and the wolf a projection screen for a crisis that is, in reality, a crisis of the human-nature relationship and of lobbying.

Further reading: “When the wolf population is restricted, but recreational hunting increases” | Dossier “The Wolf in Europe”