Into the Eternal Hunting Grounds with Recreational Hunting
The credibility and purpose of today's commercialised hunting have long been scientifically disproven. What remains is a militant, murky brew of hunters' tall tales that has entrenched itself in our culture.
Recreational hunters describe hunting as a great passion that exerts a powerful fascination.
The word passion carries with it the undertone of something destructive and suffering-inducing. Hunting is about unleashed greed, egoism, violence and self-promotion – not virtues, but a lack of culture and animal cruelty.
The question of whether killing animals is truly necessary and ethically justifiable barely penetrates the perception of the recreational hunter in the frenzy of hunting fever. And yet no animal, just as we humans, wishes to be torn prematurely from life. A process of learning and reflection still ahead for the recreational hunter, in order to renounce the killing of animals as a leisure pursuit.
The personal worldview and value system of today's recreational hunter is seriously out of balance. All life shares a common origin, and we too are merely a species of mammal that calls itself human. In cases of doubt, one always decides in favour of life — as we also grant to human beings within our cultural sphere.
The procurement of game meat is no longer a necessity of life today. Inflicting pain, suffering, fear and death upon animals is not hunting ethics under the Animal Welfare Act, but pure animal cruelty.
Wild animals also live in family groups. Nevertheless, caught up in their hunting passion, recreational hunters shoot mother animals, father animals and young animals — and as a rule only healthy animals at that. In doing so, they increase the reproductive output of certain species in order to be able to hunt and kill even more.
The animals hunted today mostly for fun are peaceful creatures toward humans, who have at least as much right to exist as humans do, to participate in our shared evolution, and they are also animals that the majority of Swiss people are happy to encounter on walks and hikes through forests and fields.
There is no ethic that endorses the killing of animals without justification. When humans hunted in earlier times, it was done with respect for life and only to feed one's own kin. Today, no one needs to go hunting in order to eat. The Stone Age is over!
The forest and nature should be returned to humans and animals as a peaceful space for recreation and coexistence. Our times are increasingly shaped by brutality and violence, and the hunting community is not without its share of responsibility. The negative energies of violence, fear, terror, disrespect, animal cruelty, disturbance, environmental pollution, and discomfort that hunters leave behind in nature — above all among wildlife — are long past their time and represent a cultural diminishment of quality of life for society.
Interest Group Wild beim Wild
The IG Wild beim Wild is a non-profit interest group committed to the sustainable and non-violent improvement of the human-animal relationship, with a specialization in the legal aspects of wildlife protection. One of our primary concerns is to introduce a contemporary and rigorous wildlife management system in the cultural landscape, modeled on the Canton of Geneva — without recreational hunters, but with principled wildlife wardens who genuinely deserve the title and act according to a code of honor. 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.
