Humanewashing: how hobby hunting sells killing as care

Corporations have long known the principle. Anyone running an environmentally damaging business surrounds it with language that sounds sustainable: «climate-neutral», «nature-friendly», «responsible».

This is called greenwashing. Less well known is this principle's twin when it comes to dealing with animals. The US organisation Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting has coined a fitting term for it: humanewashing. It refers to the use of carefully chosen words that make killing appear compassionate, necessary or useful.

An important distinction is often overlooked. Hobby hunting cultivates two languages, not one. One is directed inward, at its own guild: the huntsman's Latin of «muzzle», «blood» and «bag», which defuses the act of killing for those involved. We dissected this internal language in the article «Hunter's Latin: how hunting jargon glosses over killing». The other language is directed outward, at the public, the media and politics. It sounds factual, official, almost scientific — and that is precisely what this piece is about. For while the internal jargon merely creates distance, the outward-facing language fulfils a strategic task: it is meant to legitimise hobby hunting.

The vocabulary of legitimation

The language directed outward avoids anything unseemly. A wild animal is not killed, it is «taken» or «harvested». The kill is called «regulation», «population control» or «wildlife management». Hobby hunting operates under the banner of «Hege» (game husbandry), «care», «sustainable use» or «management» of a resource. Where an animal dies outside the hunt, it discreetly disappears as «road kill».

These terms share a common feature: they borrow authority from economics, administration and science. «sustainable use» comes from forestry. «Management» sounds like corporate rationality. «Regulation» suggests a technical, value-free intervention, as neutral as adjusting a thermostat. Whoever uses these words places themselves, almost unnoticed, alongside experts, authorities and ecologists. Killing as a leisure practice disappears behind a façade of objectivity.

When language collides with effect

The decisive question is: does the effect match the claim behind the term? In the case of the word «regulation», this can be tested on the red deer. According to the Federal Hunting Statistics, the population in Switzerland is currently estimated at around 40,000 animals, and it continues to grow even though kill figures have been rising for years. This is not a contradiction seen only by critics: the cantonal Office for Nature, Hunting and Fisheries already noted in its report «Overview of the Red Deer Situation in St. Gallen» (2022) that the current hunting «cull» is insufficient in some areas to regulate the population. The term therefore does not carry the claimed effect on its own. Anyone who sells «regulation» as an effective reduction or stabilisation of a population must show that the measure actually achieves this goal. Where populations keep growing despite rising kill numbers, all that remains of the word is the claim.

Our analysis shows how hobby hunting even fuels, in part, the overpopulation it claims to combat: «Why hobby hunting makes the problem it claims to solve bigger». And whether the self-image of the hobby hunter as conservationist withstands a sober comparison is examined in our fact check «Hobby hunters as conservationists?». In both cases the same pattern applies: the terms promise what the figures fail to deliver.

Something similar applies to «Hege». The word suggests care, protection, nurture. Yet under this label may lie feeding, baiting and other interventions that locally increase populations or displace wild animals spatially. Add to this the hunting pressure that persists for a large part of the year. Where areas of rest and refuge are lacking, this can turn the claim of care into its very opposite, and «Hege» becomes a euphemism for the disturbance it should actually be naming.

Whom the language serves

If this stopped at criticism of wording, little would be gained. The decisive question is: who benefits from killing sounding like care? The answer leads to concrete interests. The association needs the image of the responsible steward to justify a leisure activity involving firearms to society. Authorities need it to present kills as orderly wildlife management, rather than tackling the hard structural questions of habitat, traffic and agriculture.

How thin the rhetoric of care becomes once things get serious is shown by Ticino. There, in connection with wolf regulation, talk emerged of the «armed arm of the state» and new «rules of engagement» — a police-and-military vocabulary that has nothing left in common with «Hege». We documented these statements and their context in «Ticino: hobby hunting, the state monopoly on violence, and the factor-4 myth». Anyone speaking this way is describing neither tradition nor care, but the mobilisation of armed hobby hunters for a state-defined killing mandate. Between «armed arm of the state» and «Hege» there is no contradiction, but a division of labour: one is the function, the other the packaging.

An honest debate begins with honest terms

«Regulation», «Hege», «cull» and «sustainable use» sound technical and neutral. But they are not automatically so: they already imply that killing wild animals is necessary, caring or ecologically effective. Used without proof of actual effect, they linguistically legitimise killing and disarm criticism before it has even been examined. Precisely for this reason, authorities and hunting associations must disclose what concrete goal a kill pursues, how its success is measured, and which non-lethal alternatives were considered. Whoever says «regulation» must prove regulation. Whoever says «Hege» must show wherein the welfare of the individual animal, the population and the habitat actually lies.

Anyone who wants to protect wild animals must not allow language to turn an animal's death into an invisible administrative act. It is not about «harvest» or a «cull», but about an animal that dies from a gunshot. Further fact checks, analyses and background information are collected in our dossiers on hobby hunting.