How hunting PR distorts reality and responsibility
The IG Wild beim Wild clearly rejects hunting fairs such as 'Hohe Jagd & Fischerei' because they stage the killing of animals as recreational entertainment and cultural heritage, thereby normalizing a culture of violence that is incompatible with contemporary animal and nature protection.
Instead of exhibition stands for weapons, trophies and hunting trips, we need platforms for genuine wildlife protection, education, compassionate encounters with wildlife and the phase-out of recreational hunting. The Salzburg hunting lobby stages the 'Hohe Jagd & Fischerei' fair as a 'meeting place for passion, craftsmanship and genuine nature experience', but behind this hunting feel-good rhetoric lies a system that deliberately produces wildlife for shooting and combats predators.
When hunting organizations speak of 'connection with nature', 'responsibility for wildlife and forests' and 'genuine nature experience', they systematically conceal that their practice in Europe has been based for decades on artificially maintained high ungulate populations, intensive feeding, trophy culture and hunting of foxes, crows and other predators – 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 the same associations politically mobilize against strictly protected animals like lynx and wolf, demand shooting quotas and run enemy campaigns against predators. The talk of «responsibility towards nature» is in this context mainly semantic quibbling: It cloaks the fact that here a recreational activity with firearms is declared normal and sold as «nature conservation», while scientific literature and practical examples from hunting-poor or hunting-free regions show that wildlife populations can be stabilized without hobby hunting and with professional wildlife management, habitat protection and traffic management.
The IG Wild beim Wild therefore calls on media and politics to critically question 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 just because they stand in the way of their hunting tradition.