Driven hunt near Johanniskreuz: recreational hunter found dead on high seat
During the same hunt in the Palatinate Forest, a wild boar seriously injures a 29-year-old. How the 48-year-old came to suffer a gunshot wound remains unclear.
Stock image. Photo: Tobias Doering / Unsplash
«Driven hunt»
After a driven hunt near Johanniskreuz (municipality of Trippstadt, district of Kaiserslautern), a 48-year-old recreational hunter was found dead with a gunshot wound on a high seat on Tuesday, 3 November 2026.
Police have seized several firearms and opened an investigation into the death. During the same hunt, a 29-year-old recreational hunter was seriously injured by a wild boar.
What the police have said so far
Shortly after 11 a.m., police received a tip-off: witnesses had spotted the man motionless on a high seat. Helpers began resuscitation and continued until the emergency services arrived. For the 48-year-old, all help came too late. “A gunshot wound was found on the deceased,” says the statement from the Westpfalz police headquarters.
The circumstances are still unclear for now, and investigators are examining various possible sequences of events. Police have taken down the personal details of those involved in the hunt and seized several firearms. Participants affected were looked after by psychosocial emergency care, as nachrichten-kl.de and the Wochenblatt Reporter report. The SWR describes it as a drive hunt. Who fired the shot, and from which direction it came, is not known. Until the investigation is complete, the presumption of innocence applies to everyone involved.
Second casualty: attack by a wild boar
During the same hunt, a 29-year-old recreational hunter was seriously injured by a wild boar and treated in hospital. According to the current state of the investigation, there is, according to Police, nothing to suggest that the two incidents are connected.
In driven and drive hunts, wild boars are deliberately flushed out of their cover and pushed towards the shooters. Animals that are cornered or wounded fight back. That recreational hunters themselves come to harm is a known consequence of this form of hunting, which Wild beim Wild describes in the dossier Driven hunt.
Rhineland-Palatinate: second recreational hunter with a gunshot wound on a high seat since August
The case recalls Dürrholz in the Westerwald, also in Rhineland-Palatinate: there, on the night of 30 August, a 58-year-old hunting leaseholder fatally shot a 50-year-old colleague on a high seat. The public prosecutor in Koblenz is investigating on suspicion of negligent homicide, as Wild beim Wild reported in “Another fatal hunting accident: recreational hunter shot dead on high seat”. In southern France, too, two people were shot dead during wild boar hunts within ten days this season.
In group hunts, many armed people are in the forest at the same time, the game is on the move and visibility is often limited. A high seat only offers protection if firing directions and positions are consistently planned and observed. The risks such hunts also pose to bystanders are documented in the article "Risk Forest".
What now needs to be clarified
The investigations must establish which weapon the shot came from, from which position it was fired and whether the hunt leader's safety rules were observed. It is also unclear who organised the hunt and how many people took part. Wild beim Wild will report on any new findings.
How differently such deaths are judged publicly is shown in the article "Recreational hunters die: mourning. Joggers die: their own fault". Further cases can be found in the dossier Hunting accidents and in the section Crime & hunting.
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.
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