How hunting PR distorts reality and responsibility

The IG Wild beim Wild clearly rejects hunting fairs such as the «Hohe Jagd & Fischerei» because they stage the killing of animals as a leisure activity and cultural asset, thereby normalizing a culture of violence that is incompatible with contemporary animal and nature conservation.

Instead of exhibition stands for weapons, trophies, and hunting trips, we need platforms for genuine wildlife conservation, education, compassionate encounters with wild animals, and opting out of recreational hunting. The Salzburg hunting lobby presents the "High Hunting & Fishing" trade fair as a "meeting place for passion, craftsmanship, and genuine nature experiences," but behind this feel-good rhetoric lies a system that selectively breeds wild animals for shooting and combats predators.

When hunting organizations speak of "connection to nature", "responsibility for wildlife and forests" and "genuine nature experience", they systematically conceal the fact that their practice in Europe has been based for decades on artificially maintained populations of ungulates, intensive feeding, trophy hunting and the hunting of foxes, crows and other predators, i.e. on interventions that weaken natural regulatory mechanisms and delegitimize the ecological role of predators.

Hobby hunters like to present themselves as "partners of nature" and "guarantors of balance," while these same associations politically mobilize against strictly protected animals like the lynx and wolf, demand culling regimes, and conduct scapegoating campaigns against predators. Talk of "responsibility towards nature" in this context is primarily semantic quibbling: it masks the fact that a recreational activity involving firearms is being normalized and sold as "nature conservation," while scientific literature and practical examples from regions with little or no hunting demonstrate that wildlife populations can be stabilized without recreational hunting and with professional wildlife management, habitat protection, and traffic control.

The IG Wild beim Wild therefore calls on the media and politicians to critically examine the PR formulas of the hunting lobby and not to adopt the language of those who turn wild animals into "pieces" and reinterpret predators as problems simply because they stand in the way of their hunting tradition.