Pelts and Trophies in Thun

How the Bernese cantonal event combines tradition, commerce and animal suffering. Criticism of the trophy exhibition in Thun on Friday and Saturday, 30 and 31 January 2026, at the Thun Expo Center.

Wild animals are not commodities for entertainment, prestige and commerce.

IG Wild beim Wild sharply criticizes the Bernese cantonal trophy exhibition and the pelt and fur market in Thun. Year after year, the event presents killed wild animals as trophies, decorative objects and trade goods. This normalizes a treatment of wild animals that is no longer appropriate and clearly contradicts societal expectations regarding animal ethics and respect for fellow creatures.

The organizers sell the exhibition as preserving tradition and as a contribution to so-called wildlife management. In reality, thousands of killed wild animals are at the center, whose body parts are measured, scored and awarded. This competition promotes an outdated trophy culture where it is not the animal as a sentient individual that counts, but the hunting achievement and the size of the antlers or horns.

Particularly offensive is that the event additionally serves as a marketplace for trading in pelts. Fox pelts and other skins are purchased there. This trade ignores the suffering behind each individual pelt and contributes to viewing wild animals as raw material. While politics and society are taking clear steps toward restricting the fur trade, Thun continues to celebrate a commercialized form of recreational hunting that is ethically barely justifiable.

While the Federal Council and Parliament are legally moving toward restricting fur products, a traditional fur market continues to be celebrated in Thun, where fox pelts are awarded and raffled off and fur traders purchase pelts at unit prices of about 8 francs for fox and 15 francs for marten.

IG Wild beim Wild also points out that the hunting practice presented often conveys a sanitized image. In reality, missed shots, injured animals and long suffering are part of everyday recreational hunting. These aspects are neither addressed at the exhibition nor openly communicated by those responsible. The claim that the trophy show serves to analyze the condition of wildlife populations is hardly tenable. Scientifically based monitoring instruments do not require displayed skulls and antlers that primarily serve self-presentation. The trophies presented in Thun are a material expression of thousands 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 exposed to such events without being taught a respectful and appropriate treatment of wild animals. Instead of knowledge transfer, a spectacle takes center stage that trivializes violence and propagates a romanticized hunting world.

Weapons dealers, optics manufacturers, hunting accessories, hunting trips, raffles of hunting kills abroad: an industrial hunting system of violence emerges in which kills and animal bodies are part of a marketing system.

Those who kill senselessly do not protect, and civilized society gains nothing from it. Hobby hunters thus do not ensure healthy or natural wildlife populations, especially not with their abhorrent fox hunting. The City of Thun already had to face questions in the city council about the pelt and fur market, such as ethical aspects, licensing practices and public impact.

The IG Wild beim Wild calls on the responsible authorities of the city of Thun to fundamentally reconsider this event. A civilized society does not need competitions where dead wild animals are presented as achievements, and it does not need a market where pelts are traded like ordinary commodities. What is needed instead is a respectful understanding of wild animals, professionally grounded wildlife ecology, and an abandonment of recreational hunting.