Lower Saxony: Application for Hunting Law Pacification

For animal and nature lovers, it is unbearable that hobby hunters hunt on their property — and are particularly fond of doing so in the very spots that were specifically created as refuges for the animals.

Tamara D. and her partner, as vegetarians, reject the killing of animals. At the beginning of 2020, the property owners submitted an application for hunting law pacification. Read their account here:

Our property is bordered by fields and a small stream, beyond which lies a small wood — which is why a wide variety of animals can frequently be observed on and around our land: roe deer, pheasants, hares, foxes, partridges and many more. For years we have therefore only managed the part of our property that we actually want to use ourselves. The remaining third of our land is left to grow, spread and thrive freely, so that animals can find shelter and food in these corners.

Our relationship with the hunters has never been particularly good — they shot our dog several years ago without even apologising. Beyond this deeply painful experience, we are also opposed to hunting and killing animals in general, which is why we have been living vegetarian for about two years now — we don’t even kill the mice that wander into our house, but instead patiently catch them in live traps and release them back into the wild outside.

We repeatedly have hunters who both hunt on our property and shoot onto it from adjacent fields or from the small woodland — and they particularly like to target the corners that we deliberately let grow wild so that animals can use them as shelter. Time and again we have sought dialogue with the hunters, as we find it appalling that they specifically target these corners — because we want to help the animals, not send them to their deaths.

On top of that, we again have a dog who is free to move around our property and is actually supposed to do so — yet on several occasions the hunters failed to warn us in advance that they would be shooting onto our property from the adjacent meadows. So it happened more than once that our dog and we ourselves were outside when shots were suddenly fired onto our property — always at a certain distance from our house, admittedly. But how are we supposed to know that we and our dog are only allowed to stay within a certain radius of our house if we receive no prior notice that shooting is taking place?

In late summer 2019, an incident occurred that was finally the last straw for us: the hunters were shooting in the woodland behind our property and wounded a pheasant. The bird fell, still alive, into the small stream that separates our property from the woodland, and dragged itself with its last strength up the bank on the side of our property. From the other side of the stream, the hunters then pelted the pheasant with stones until the animal died, after which they waded through the stream to retrieve the dead bird from our property. It was simply cruel, and in that moment we knew once and for all that we had to do something to finally ensure that such things would no longer happen on our property.

It was only when we began to look intensively into the matter that we came across — through the website www.zwangsbejagung-ade.de — the possibility of a hunting law pacification order. We had not known before that we could even submit such an application. We filed it immediately — and then heard nothing for a good two months.

Before the hunting authority itself had even responded to our application, we received a visit from the hobby hunter. He already knew about the application and wanted to convince us to withdraw it. Although he was genuinely polite and friendly, we still felt very intimidated — because the hunter told us that in addition to the application costs, there would be considerable additional and consequential costs, that the application would probably be rejected anyway, which would also be billed to us at several hundred euros, and that his hobby hunter buddies would laugh at us, since our attempt was so ridiculous and doomed to fail. He only meant well, he said — he wanted to save us unnecessary costs, and in future he would be happy to put a note in our letterbox a week in advance so we would know that shooting was scheduled again. We should really withdraw the application, in our own best interest.

We were left feeling completely unsettled after the conversation, and had no idea at all what to do: keep the application or withdraw it? Of course, nothing had changed about our reasons for submitting it, but unfortunately we were also not in a financial position to put several thousand euros — as threatened by the hunter — into the exemption process.

We are very glad that we first decided to reach out directly to the Initiative Zwangsbejagung ade. We received a quick response and, most importantly, our fears about the enormous costs that had been threatened were put to rest. Since then, we have been in contact with several landowners who have already successfully had their properties exempted from compulsory hunting, and who are there for us with kind advice and practical support for every question and problem.

We have not withdrawn our application and will not do so, now that we know the hobby hunter's statements were simply lies. In the meantime, we have also received an initial response from the hunting authority. In addition to the documents about our property that we had already submitted, they now also wanted us to provide the first and last names and current addresses of all owners of properties adjacent to ours. They also questioned our motives: if we have been living vegetarian for years, why are we only now submitting an application for hunting exemption? We felt the response letter was nothing more than an attempt to delay the matter and, above all, to wear us down. But we refuse to be beaten down any longer and have already found out all the other property owners through the land registry office, and once again set out in a detailed reply letter why we insist on the hunting exemption for our property.

We passed both on to the hunting authority at the beginning of February 2020 and are now very curious to see how they will respond and what they might try to do to drag the matter out further.

One thing we know for certain is that we will stay on the ball and see our application through. We do not want and will not tolerate animals being killed on our property any longer, and we will fight to ensure that this will not happen in the future either!»