Lucerne and the Red Fox: When Politics Ignores the Facts

The response from the Spatial Planning, Environment and Energy Commission (RUEK) under chairman Michael Kurmann reads as if it had been copied straight from a statement by JagdSchweiz.

The petition is allegedly “neither factually nor economically sensible.” Placing the fox under protection would supposedly bring “no discernible benefit.” Period. Case closed.

Anyone who reads the brief RUEK report quickly notices: there was no research here, just rubber-stamping. The petitioner was not even given a hearing. Instead, the commission allowed itself to be lectured exclusively by the BUWD — that is, by precisely the authority that has clung to the status quo of hobby hunting for decades.

The great bluff: “Only Geneva does it differently”

The RUEK report contains the sentence that brings the entire line of argument crashing down: “Apart from the city canton of Geneva, the fox is hunted throughout Switzerland.” While this is formally not incorrect, it is a deliberately abbreviated portrayal. A look across the national border and into other cantons tells a very different story.

Luxembourg: more than ten years without fox hunting

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg introduced a total ban on fox hunting in 2015. Since then, the ban has been extended year after year, most recently through a regulation that protects foxes for several years in advance. Even after the change of government in 2023, when the Christian Social CSV took over the environment ministry, the ban remained in place.

The reasoning given by the Luxembourg Ministry of the Environment hits the mark: “There is no scientifically sound evidence of a negative impact on biodiversity caused by the fox.” The disappearance of the partridge or the brown hare is due to the intensification of agriculture, not to the fox.

Even more revealing is the finding regarding the fox tapeworm, which the Swiss hobby hunters’ lobby regularly invokes as a bogeyman: in Luxembourg, the infestation rate has fallen since the hunting ban was introduced. Whereas in 2014, under continued hunting, it had risen to 39.7 percent, eight years later it was below 10 percent. Hunting spreads the tapeworm, protection reduces it. That is the sober Luxembourg data.

Canton of Geneva: without hobby hunting since 1974

In the canton of Geneva, the population abolished militia hunting in 1974. Since then, wildlife management has been carried out by professionally trained state game wardens. In the last hunting season, zero foxes were shot for recreational pleasure in Geneva. Three full-time positions are enough for regulation and prevention. The long-term average of wildlife damage is comparable to cantons in which hobby hunters are allowed to operate freely, such as Schaffhausen.

The total costs for wildlife management in Geneva amount to around one million francs per year. That corresponds to approximately one cup of coffee per inhabitant. So much for the RUEK's claim that placing the fox under protection would entail «significant additional costs» with no offsetting benefit.

Canton of Ticino: Fox hunting only marginal

In the canton of Ticino, too, reality looks different from what the RUEK would have us believe. Hobby hunting of foxes is an absolute marginal phenomenon there. Ticino hobby hunters are primarily interested in red deer, roe deer, chamois and wild boar during the high hunting season. The fox is statistically practically irrelevant. A realistic picture of Switzerland would therefore be: one canton without fox hunting, one canton with hardly any fox hunting, a neighboring country with a total ban. The RUEK reduces this reality to a footnote.

And the rest of Europe?

In Great Britain, the classic fox hunt with hounds has been banned since 2005 in England and Wales, and even longer in Scotland. In the Netherlands, fox hunting is severely restricted. Switzerland, with its nationwide fox hunting, is not the norm but a European backwater.

The RUEK's economic lie

The commission argues that placing foxes under protection would be expensive. On closer inspection, this is a smokescreen. What does hobby hunting really cost the canton of Lucerne? Handling of wildlife accidents, tracking of wounded animals, management culls, consultations, awareness-raising, trapping in settlement areas – all of this is presented in the RUEK report as a service rendered by the 122 hunting associations. The Geneva model shows: these tasks can be carried out by state game wardens with a few full-time positions. Professionally, in a controlled manner, scientifically, transparently. Without a leasing system, without vested interests, without a trophy mentality.

The claim that this would be more expensive does not stand up to scrutiny. It is a political argument, not an economic one.

Three sentences, three distortions

The revealing core of the RUEK report can be found in a single passage: "Placing the red fox under protection brings no recognizable benefit — neither for humans, nor for nature, nor for the red fox itself. Protection would additionally cause considerable extra costs. A cantonal protection of the fox, a species huntable under federal law, is therefore considered by the RUEK to be neither factually nor economically sensible or justified."

Three sentences, three distortions. It is worth taking this passage apart.

"No recognizable benefit, not even for the red fox itself"

This is probably the most cynical formulation in the entire report. The RUEK seriously claims that protecting the red fox brings "the red fox itself" no benefit. Translated, this means: It makes no difference to the fox whether it is shot or not. The living fox has no recognizable advantage over the dead fox.

This is no longer a factual assessment. It is a moral declaration of bankruptcy. The Swiss Animal Welfare Act requires a "reasonable ground" for killing an animal. The RUEK reverses this logic: it claims that not killing requires justification. The fox practically has to apologize for existing.

The statement is also factually wrong. It has long been established in wildlife biology that intensive hunting destabilizes fox populations, provokes higher reproduction rates and intensifies migratory movements. In the Bavarian Forest National Park, where foxes are not hunted, the litter size is around 1.7 cubs per vixen; in intensively hunted territories, it is about three times as high. Protection therefore benefits the individual fox, the population, which stabilizes itself, and ultimately also humans through less tapeworm transmission and more stable populations.

"Considerable extra costs"

This is the economic smokescreen. Geneva has been demonstrating the opposite since 1974: three full-time wildlife ranger positions, about one million francs per year for the entire wildlife management — a cup of coffee per inhabitant. Including compensation for wildlife damage.

What the RUEK conceals: Hobby hunting in Lucerne is not a gift to the taxpayer. It also has costs. Administrative work for 122 leasing contracts, hunting supervision, coordination, handling conflicts with the public. These costs appear nowhere in the report. It is simply claimed that the status quo is free and any change expensive. That is accounting based on wishful thinking.

"Neither factually nor economically sensible or justified"

Here the form becomes the content. "Not factually sensible" without a single scientific source. "Not economically sensible" without a single number. "Not justified" in a report that is itself not justified.

This is rhetoric at its final stage: one claims the other side has no arguments, and offers none oneself. The RUEK makes it its method to dispose of the opposing position through mere negation.

What the section is actually saying

If you strip away the legal packaging, the message reads: We, the Lucerne political establishment, have no interest in seriously engaging with hobby hunting of the fox. We have no interest in examining the Luxembourg data. We have no interest in the Animal Welfare Act. We have no interest in wildlife research. We want the 122 hunting associations to keep their leases and continue shooting. Period.

That is the subtext, and it is in fact perverse. Perverse not in a moralizing sense, but in the literal sense: inverted, twisted, turned on its head. A petition that calls for scientific scrutiny is dismissed with unscientific claims. An animal that deserves protection is refused protection with the argument that protection wouldn't benefit it. A commission that should examine the matter with an open outcome formulates the result before the examination.

The disease lie: Hobby hunting spreads what it claims to fight

In its report, the RUEK uncritically adopts one of the oldest hunting narratives: hobby hunting of the fox is supposedly necessary to "contain diseases and parasites dangerous to humans and pets." This is precisely the argument Pascal Wolf described in his petition as scientifically unsupported. And he is right. Because research over the last thirty years shows the exact opposite: Hobby hunters spread diseases, rather than combating them.

The mechanism is biologically trivial and has long been documented. When intact fox territories are torn open by shootings, young foxes roam widely in search of free territories. These young animals are more susceptible to pathogens, they spread parasites faster and over greater distances, and the increased reproduction rate forced by hunting continually delivers new carriers.Hobby hunting promotes the very diseases it claims to solve. An intact fox society with stable territories does the opposite: less migratory movement, fewer young animals, less transmission.

The Canton of Lucerne embarrasses itself with its own figures

Here it gets particularly embarrassing for the RUEK. Research by IG Wild beim Wild at the cantonal offices for hunting and fisheries has brought astonishing facts to light: Only the Canton of Lucerne keeps any statistics at all on diseases in foxes. And these statistics are a declaration of bankruptcy for the hunting disease narrative.

In the hunting year 2018/19, 2,217 foxes were shot in the Canton of Lucerne. According to the canton's own statistics, only 39 of these animals were sick: 32 with mange, one with distemper, six with other findings. That is 1.76 percent. So almost 98 percent of the foxes shot by Lucerne hobby hunters were perfectly healthy and were turned into nothing but hazardous waste, disposed of at the taxpayer's expense. If the RUEK claims that fox hunting serves to contain diseases, it ought to know this figure. If it doesn't, it is incompetent. If it does and remains silent, it is dishonest.

Fox tapeworm: the Swiss hunting narrative collapses

A four-year study from the Nancy region investigated whether intensified fox hunting curbs the spread of the fox tapeworm. The result is devastating for the hunting lobby: 1,700 working hours, 15,000 kilometers of nighttime car journeys, 776 foxes shot, a 35 percent increase in hunting pressure. The fox population was not reduced. The infection rate with the fox tapeworm rose in the intensively hunted area from 40 to 55 percent, while it remained constant in the comparison area. The study's title is programmatic: «Echinococcus multilocularis management by fox culling: An inappropriate paradigm.»

Luxembourg provides the counter-experiment in practice: since the introduction of the hunting ban, the infestation rate of foxes with the fox tapeworm has decreased, not increased. The effective measure is deworming bait, not lead ammunition. The RUEK does not know this data — or does not want to know it.

The fox as health officer

What the RUEK also ignores: a single fox eats around 4,000 mice per year. Mice are the central hosts for ticks, and ticks transmit Lyme disease, TBE, and hantaviruses. Anyone hunting foxes is indirectly hunting their own immune system. More mice means more ticks. More ticks means more tick-borne diseases. The cantons that most intensively allow foxes to be shot statistically have the most problems with wildlife-related diseases. The canton of Lucerne belongs to this group.

When the RUEK writes that placing the fox under protection brings "no discernible benefit" for humans, this is not only contrary to animal welfare. It is also negligent in terms of public health policy.

When 122 hunting associations turn into statistics

In the 2022/23 hunting year, the approximately 10,000 Swiss small-game hunters shot 18,943 predators. A considerable share of these were red foxes. Over five years, that amounts to a kill of around 100,000 foxes, on an area not even as large as the German state of Bavaria.

Anyone who takes out a hunting lease as a hobby hunter in Lucerne wants to shoot. That is the core of it. And for this lust for shooting, the same myths have been recycled for decades: rabies control (eradicated in Switzerland since 1998, by the way, not through shooting but through vaccine baits), fox tapeworm (significantly declining in Luxembourg without hunting), protection of ground-nesting birds (whose decline the Luxembourg environment minister scientifically clearly attributes to habitat destruction), mange. The thesis that the fox must be reduced to protect the forests also does not hold up to reality.

This carousel of arguments has a recognizable logic: as soon as one argument is refuted, the next is pushed forward. The actual motive — the pleasure of hunting — is never openly stated. Particularly questionable is nighttime stand hunting at bait sites, which is still permitted in Lucerne.

The psychology behind the Lucerne RUEK report

Calling the RUEK report cynical is formally correct. Calling it merely cynical falls short. Behind the reflexive rejection of the petition lies a discernible psychological structure of hunting that is particularly pronounced in the Canton of Lucerne. The psychology of hobby hunting in the Canton of Lucerne explains why a factually harmless petition is met with such aggressive refusal to engage in argument.

Territorial hunting as a loyalty system

The Lucerne territorial hunting system is based on multi-year lease agreements with 122 hunting associations. Whoever holds the territory holds interpretive authority over the local game population. Anyone who shoots too little risks losing the lease. This is a classic insider model: access to resources creates loyalty, loyalty protects access. Anyone outside the circle supposedly doesn't understand “the reality on the ground.” Scientific criticism, animal welfare arguments and legal objections are dismissed as the opinions of outsiders.

Precisely this mechanism is reflected in the RUEK's behavior. Pascal Wolf was not heard because he is not an insider. The BUWD was consulted because it is part of the system. A commission closely interwoven with the hunting milieu has no institutional incentive to question that milieu. In this way, a system immunizes itself against self-reflection while simultaneously claiming public funds that in reality primarily serve to protect hunting privileges.

The silent decline of the lynx as a mirror

In the Canton of Lucerne, the number of lynx is decreasing, even though suitable habitats are available. A strictly protected species is vanishing from suitable habitat, and the administration is not conducting any discernible critical analysis of the causes. Psychologically, this is revealing: where the lynx takes roe deer that hobby hunters claim for themselves, it is not a partner but a competitor. A decline does not trigger an alarm response within the hunting milieu, but rather quiet relief.

Applied to the fox, the same pattern emerges. In the hunting self-image, the fox is not a fellow creature but “vermin,” that is, a competitor. Anyone seeking to restrict hobby hunting of foxes is not attacking a practice but an identity pattern. That is why the RUEK's reaction is so aggressive, even though the petition soberly called only for an examination.

The hunting calendar as an entitlement culture

The Lucerne hunting calendar 2025/26 covers red deer, roe deer, wild boar, brown hare, fox, badger, beech and pine marten, squirrel, and cormorant. For various species, the season extends across practically the entire year. What reads like a factual listing is in reality a license for year-round intervention in the lives of wild animals. Animal species that are in no ecological crisis and for whose hunting there is no scientific justification stand on equal footing alongside species for which at least rudimentary regulatory arguments exist.

Pascal Wolf's petition has scratched this culture of entitlement at a single point — the fox. Even this minimal intervention was reflexively rebuffed. This reveals how non-negotiable the system considers its own practice.

Precautionary alarmism instead of science

In the canton of Lucerne, where the wolf has so far hardly been present, “regulatory powers” are already being demanded before the animals even arrive. The RUEK report shows the same pattern with the fox: precautionary scare scenarios about additional costs and dangerous diseases, without these being backed up by data. The psychological disposition of hobby hunting works with threat narratives, because the self-image as an indispensable ordering authority only functions as long as some alleged danger needs to be averted.

That is the subtext of the RUEK's key sentence: “no discernible benefit, neither for humans, for nature, nor for the red fox itself.” Translated, it means: as long as we are allowed to claim that protection causes harm and killing is useful, we don't have to change our practice. This is not factual argumentation. This is identity defense.

Aggressiveness as self-description

Psychological studies show: hobby hunters clearly rate themselves as more aggressive than non-hunters. In the Dutch E-Screener test, one in five hunting license applicants fails. Switzerland has no such test to this day. In the canton of Lucerne, this means: 122 hunting associations with hundreds of hobby hunters, a statistically significant portion of whom would not pass an independent psychological aptitude test. These hobby hunters shoot around 2,000 foxes every year.

When RUEK defends this against all evidence, it is not just defending an administrative system. It is defending a subculture that decides over the lives of tens of thousands of wild animals with firearms, year-round killing rights, and zero societal oversight. A subculture whose self-image feels threatened precisely when someone from outside — for instance a petitioner from Lucerne — asks the simplest of all questions: Why, actually?

Even hobby hunters call fox hunting pointless

What RUEK fails to mention in its report: criticism of fox hunting has long since stopped coming only from animal welfare organizations. It comes from wildlife biology, from animal welfare law, and even from within the ranks of hobby hunting itself. Anyone familiar with the current state of the debate knows: defending fox hunting is an increasingly lonely position.

Franz Balmer from the Canton of Zurich: «We are damaging the reputation of hunting»

In November 2025, the Tagesanzeiger reported on a case that lays bare the internal rift within Swiss hobby hunting. Franz Balmer has been a hobby hunter in the Canton of Zurich for 13 years. When his own hunting association defended fox hunting in an association bulletin using the usual slogans, he wrote an indignant letter to the editor. His central sentence: «In doing so, we damage the reputation of hunting more than we benefit it.»

Balmer criticizes his association for clinging to outdated claims and ignoring scientific findings. Instead of openly discussing the sense and nonsense of fox hunting, the association defends a tradition at all costs. That is exactly what RUEK Lucerne is doing as well. When a man who has known the practice of fox hunting first-hand for 13 years reaches this conclusion, RUEK's position is no longer tenable, either professionally or ethically.

In the same Tagesanzeiger article, wildlife biologist Sandra Gloor has her say. Her statement is unambiguous: shooting a single male or female fox from a family group has «absolutely no effect». Fox hunting has no lasting influence on the overall population. Swiss hunting training, she says, mostly conveys only formal rules rather than current findings on fox biology. The latter point hits RUEK directly: a commission that relies on statements from BUWD without consulting wildlife biology experts such as Sandra Gloor is working at a level of knowledge from the 1980s.

Robert Brunold from the canton of Graubünden: "Small game hunting is not necessary"

Robert Brunold, former president of the Graubünden hobby hunters, has also publicly admitted what the RUEK absolutely refuses to acknowledge: "Small game hunting is not necessary, but it is justified. One could likewise ask whether it makes sense to gather berries and mushrooms in the forest." A top representative of the Graubünden hobby hunting lobby compares the killing of healthy wild animals to picking mushrooms. In doing so, he concedes what wildlife biology has been demonstrating for thirty years: fox hunting fulfills no ecological or public health function. It is a leisure activity. Nothing more.

When a hunting association president himself puts small game hunting on the level of mushroom picking, the RUEK's reasoning becomes even more embarrassing. The commission is not defending a necessity, but rather a bloody and cruel hobby that its own officials openly describe as unnecessary.

The legal front: no reasonable justification

The German Legal Society for Animal Welfare Law has stated in a detailed opinion that fox hunting under today's conditions regularly lacks the reasonable justification required by the Animal Welfare Act. Animal-welfare-compliant fox hunting is only conceivable in narrowly limited exceptional cases. Fox hunting is thus classified as the expression of an outdated understanding of hunting, practically incompatible with the constitutional goal of animal welfare.

Lovis Kauertz, chairman of Wildtierschutz Deutschland, summarizes: "It simply cannot be that the legislator submits to such an extent to the dogma of the hobby hunters' lobby organizations that not even this minimum standard of animal welfare applies to foxes and other predators." This is exactly what the RUEK Lucerne is doing. It submits to the dogma of a lobby for which killing healthy animals is more important than the Animal Welfare Act.

The scientific front: 18 studies, one finding

For more than thirty years, at least 18 wildlife biology studies have been available that demonstrate: fox hunting does not regulate populations and is not suitable for disease control. Even when three quarters of a population are shot, the same number of animals is back the following year. The more intensively foxes are hunted, the more offspring are produced. Wildlife biology now expressly speaks of an "inappropriate paradigm" — an inappropriate way of thinking.

In the Bavarian National Park, where no hunting takes place, the litter size is 1.7 pups per vixen. In intensively hunted areas, it is about three times as high. The birth rate regulates itself biologically as soon as hunting pressure is removed. This is precisely what the RUEK ignores.

The ethical front: Aktionsbündnis Fuchs and international resistance

Heidrun Heidtke of the Aktionsbündnis Fuchs puts it clearly: "Anyone who learns and sees for the first time what den hunting means is utterly shaken. The mercilessness and brutality with which foxes are pursued cannot be reconciled with the principles of morality, ethics, and animal welfare." A representative survey by the Swiss Animal Protection STS from 2017 showed: 64 percent of the Swiss population support a ban on den hunting, with only 21 percent wanting to retain it. The majority have long since arrived at the animal welfare position, not at hobby hunting.

What is left for the RUEK?

When the former president of the Grisons hobby hunters admits that low-game hunting is not necessary, when a Zurich hobby hunter writes to his own association that fox hunting damages the reputation of hunting, when wildlife biologist Sandra Gloor states clearly that shooting foxes achieves "absolutely nothing," when the German Legal Society for Animal Protection Law denies any reasonable justification, when 18 wildlife biology studies prove the futility of fox hunting, and when 64 percent of the Swiss population reject den hunting, then the RUEK's position is not only professionally untenable. It is also isolated.

The commission defends a practice that even high-ranking hobby hunters and long-time hobby hunters publicly equate to the level of mushroom picking. It defends it without studies, without data, without hearing the petitioner. This is not parliamentary policy-making based on facts. This is loyalty to a shrinking milieu that has lost the arguments and only wants to retain power.

The ignored will of the people from 2020

What is entirely missing from the RUEK report is the socio-political context. On September 27, 2020, the Swiss electorate rejected the revised Hunting Act with 51.9 percent. The Federal Council and the hobby hunting lobby had designed a law that was to give the cantons more leeway for shooting wolves, beavers, ibex, and other species. The population rejected this law at the ballot box.

The message was clear: more protection for wildlife, not less. More scientific rigor in wildlife policy, not less. Less power for the hobby hunting lobby, not more. The people explicitly demanded the opposite of what the RUEK now cements in its report.

A commission that, five years after this referendum, rejects the petition to protect the red fox with the argument that protection is "neither factually nor economically reasonable" ignores not only the scientific evidence. It also ignores the political will of the population. That is not parliamentary work on behalf of the electorate. That is lobbying for a militant subculture that has lost the majority will and tries to compensate for it with commission reports.

What the RUEK overlooked (or chose to overlook)

Pascal Wolf's petition was not naive. It did not call for immediate abolition, but for an examination of whether fox hunting could be abandoned. An examination. With an open mind. With a hearing of the petitioner. With the inclusion of wildlife biology research from the past thirty years. With a look at Luxembourg, Geneva, and other regions where fox hunting has long been history.

That is precisely what the RUEK refused to do. It did not even grant the petitioner a hearing. It consulted exclusively the BUWD, which is a party with vested interests in this matter. It dispatched the petition report in four brief paragraphs and attached a motion so predictable that it could have been generated by an AI.

This is not serious parliamentary work. It is a reflexive defense of the hunting canton of Lucerne.

Conclusion: The RUEK report is a missed opportunity

Pascal Wolf offered the canton of Lucerne an opportunity for self-correction. An opportunity to compare its own hunting regime with the realities in Luxembourg, Geneva, and other regions. An opportunity to take note of the state of wildlife research. The RUEK let this opportunity slip by unused.

What remains is a report that satisfies the hobby hunting lobby and ignores science. A motion to "take note of the petition in the sense of the aforementioned findings and conclusions." A political gesture, nothing more.

The red fox in Lucerne will continue to be shot. Not because it makes sense. But because it is convenient.

The sloppy work of the RUEK is a political opportunity. It makes visible the failure that has been flying under the radar in Lucerne's wildlife management for decades. The Tagesanzeiger report on criticism from within the ranks of hobby hunting itself is changing the discourse: anyone defending fox hunting today no longer stands only against animal rights advocates, but against long-time hobby hunters, Swiss wildlife biologists, hunting association presidents, and 18 wildlife biology studies.