Recreational hunters of the old generation
They call themselves game wardens or professional hunters and ruminate about the old days, when everything seemingly was better. Those who considered themselves both important figures and almost heroes, since in a village the “respected persons” were the mayor, the priest, the doctor and the huntmaster — often also the forester. Animals were objects — also
Game wardens ruminate about the old days
They call themselves game wardens or professional hunters and ruminate about the old days, when everything seemingly was better.
Animals were objects and wildlife was merely good meat. That is why recreational hunters in the former GDR were so important — they had access to the coveted wild game meat.
«Hunting, rooted in a centuries-old culture that inspired poets and thinkers, has abandoned numerous values and norms.»
Game Warden Dieter Bertram, former Federal Chairman of Professional Hunters
Animal ethics and animal rights
Have these game wardens ever heard of animal ethics and animal rights? Are animals truly not sentient beings to them — beings that as such ought to be respected? Why are cats and hunting dogs and other animals pampered as pets, while other animals — wild animals — die a miserable and needless death in horrific killing traps?
Game Warden Dieter Bertram rightly criticised in May 2021 that even seasoned blood-tracking dog handlers were abandoning their recovery work, because it had become unbearable to find dead sows being suckled by their piglets.
Recreational hunting is a non-culture
Why are slavery, witch-hunting, cannibalism or apartheid no longer considered tradition, yet murder, manslaughter, violence and cruelty to animals against defenceless beings in recreational hunting is supposed to be tradition?
Violence as a desirable state would accordingly be described as a culture of violence — which in common linguistic understanding represents a negatively directed inversion of the concept, thus describing a non-culture, an absence of culture.
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IG Wild beim Wild
The IG Wild beim Wild is a non-profit advocacy group committed to the sustainable and non-violent improvement of the human-animal relationship, with a particular specialisation in the legal aspects of wildlife protection. One of our primary concerns is to introduce a contemporary and serious wildlife management system in the cultivated landscape, modelled on the Canton of Geneva — without recreational hunters, but with principled game wardens who truly deserve the title and act according to a code of honour. The monopoly on the use of force belongs in the hands of the state. The IG supports scientific methods of immunocontraception for wildlife.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
