Earth hunting – legal animal cruelty in the name of hunting tradition

While dog fights, cockfights and every form of setting animals upon one another are banned in the German-speaking region, a small hunting minority is allowed to do exactly that and calls it earth hunting.

Behind this harmless term lies an archaic cruelty that has nothing to do with a bond with nature or wildlife management, but is simply about bloodlust, the exercise of power and a fetishisation of tradition.

Hunting jargon glosses it over: dogs “work” in the den, the fox is “bolted”. The reality is brutal: a hunting dog is forced into the narrow den, encounters a fox or badger there, and a fight ensues. Blood, bites, mortal terror. No one supervises, no one protects. The suffering happens in the dark, silently, but systematically.

If a private individual were to set his dog upon a wild animal and send it into the den, this would be a clear case of animal cruelty. Yet under the cover of hobby hunting, this exact scenario is legal. Here the legislator does not protect the animals, but the privileges of a lobby that has resisted every reform for decades.

Hunting romanticism or sadism?

Hunters like to claim that earth hunting is “necessary” to protect small game. A transparent pretext: studies show that fox hunting has no long-term influence whatsoever on the population. The real reason is a different one: hunting masters want to indulge “their” tradition. They want to stage bloody fights and, in the end, pose triumphantly with the killed animal. It is nothing other than legalised sadism in a green loden coat.

Particularly insidious: not only the wild animals, but the hunting dogs too are victims of this practice. Injuries from bites, torn ears, broken bones – all of this is knowingly accepted. The very same hobby hunters who present themselves as “dog lovers” deliberately send their animals into life-threatening situations. That is a betrayal of the dogs, not love.

A relic from dark times

Earth hunting is an anachronism. It stems from an era in which animal suffering was irrelevant and hobby hunters ruled over nature and creature as a master race. Anyone who still practises earth hunting today demonstrates above all one thing: that they have remained stuck in the 19th century. In a modern society that has enshrined animal welfare in its constitution, this practice is nothing other than a disgrace.

Earth hunting is not tradition, but cruelty to animals with a hunting licence. It contradicts every ethical principle and every modern notion of animal welfare. As long as this bloody practice remains permitted, the animal welfare act is a toothless paper tiger and hunting a dark stain on a society that claims to be civilised.

Dossiers: Hunting and animal welfare | The fox in Switzerland: most hunted predator without a lobby | Fox hunting without facts: how JagdSchweiz invents problems

Further articles

• Are hobby hunters psychopaths?
• Hobby hunters on the psycho-seesaw
• Aggression: understanding hobby hunters better
• Sadism: understanding hobby hunters better
• Trophies: hunting for pleasure
• Alcohol: hobby hunters and the drink problem
• Hunting and hunters: psychoanalysis
• Hobby hunters and violence in our society