IG Wild beim Wild criticizes fur and pelt market in Altstätten
How such events combine tradition, commerce and animal suffering.
Criticism of fur, pelt and trophy events in Switzerland, exemplified by the traditional fur and pelt market in Altstätten (SG) on February 5, 2026.
Wildlife are not commodities for entertainment, prestige and commerce.
IG Wild beim Wild sharply criticizes fur, pelt and trophy events in Switzerland. Such events present killed wildlife as trophies, decorative objects and trade goods year after year. This normalizes a treatment of wildlife that is no longer appropriate for our times and clearly contradicts societal expectations of animal ethics and respect for fellow creatures.
The organizers sell these events as preservation of tradition and as a contribution to so-called wildlife management. In reality, killed wildlife are at the center, whose body parts are measured, graded, awarded prizes or traded as goods. This practice promotes an outdated trophy culture in which not the animal as a sentient individual counts, but the hunting achievement and the size of antlers, horns or other 'success markers'.
Particularly offensive is that such events additionally serve as a marketplace for trade in pelts. Fox pelts and other hides are bought, evaluated, sometimes awarded prizes or raffled off. This trade ignores the suffering behind every single pelt and contributes to viewing wildlife as raw material. While politics and society take steps toward restricting the fur trade, Switzerland continues to celebrate a commercialized form of recreational hunting that is ethically hardly justifiable.
In Altstätten (SG), a traditional fur and pelt market takes place on February 5, 2026. Such markets are not folklore, but part of a system that monetizes animal bodies. When pelts are traded at unit prices, animal suffering becomes a calculation. This very logic is incompatible with a modern understanding of wildlife protection incompatible.
The IG Wild beim Wild also points out that the depicted hunting practice often conveys a romanticized image. In reality, missed shots, injured animals and prolonged suffering are part of everyday recreational hunting. These aspects are neither addressed at such events nor openly communicated by those responsible. The claim that trophy shows serve to analyze the status of wildlife populations is hardly tenable. Scientifically-based monitoring instruments do not require displayed skulls and antlers that primarily serve self-presentation. Trophies are a material expression of killed wild animals, whose shooting quality, tracking and suffering hardly appear in the official image.
From an animal welfare perspective, it is also concerning that children and young people are introduced to such events without being taught a respectful and contemporary approach to wild animals. Instead of knowledge transfer, the focus is on a spectacle that trivializes violence and propagates a romanticized hunting world.
Weapons dealers, optics manufacturers, hunting accessories, hunting trips, raffles of hunting licenses abroad: An industrial hunting system of violence emerges in which shootings and animal carcasses are part of a marketing system.
Those who kill senselessly do not protect, and it serves no benefit to civilized society. Hobby hunters thus do not ensure healthy or natural wildlife populations, particularly not with their abhorrent fox hunting. Such events regularly raise questions about ethical aspects, licensing practices and public impact, and they finally belong to be fundamentally reviewed politically and socially.
The IG Wild beim Wild calls on those responsible in municipalities, cities and cantons to fundamentally reconsider such events. A civilized society does not need competitions where dead wild animals are presented as successes, and it does not need a market where pelts are moved like arbitrary trade goods. Instead, what is needed is a respectful understanding of wild animals, professionally-founded wildlife ecology and a departure from recreational hunting.