IG Wild beim Wild criticizes hunters' market in Weinfelden
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 Weinfelden (TG) on 21 February 2026.
Wild animals are not merchandise for entertainment, prestige and commerce.
IG Wild beim Wild sharply criticizes fur, pelt and trophy events in Switzerland . Such events present killed wild animals year after year as trophies, decorative objects and commercial goods. This normalizes a treatment of wild animals that is no longer contemporary and clearly contradicts societal expectations regarding animal ethics and respect for fellow creatures.
The organizers sell these events as tradition preservation and as a contribution to so-called wildlife management. In reality, killed wild animals 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 This practice promotes an outdated trophy culture in which not the animal as a sentient individual counts, but hunting performance and the size of antlers, horns or other 'success markers'.
Particularly offensive is that such events additionally serve as a marketplace for trading pelts. Fox furs and other hides are bought, evaluated, sometimes awarded prizes or raffled off. This trade ignores the suffering behind each individual pelt and contributes to viewing wild animals as raw material. While politics and society take steps toward restricting the fur trade, a commercialized form of recreational hunting that is ethically hardly justifiable continues to be celebrated in Switzerland.
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. Precisely this logic is incompatible with a modern understanding of wildlife protection incompatible.
The IG Wild beim Wild also points out that the depicted hunting practices often convey a sanitized 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 wildlife population status is hardly tenable. Scientifically-based monitoring instruments do not require displayed skulls and antlers that primarily serve self-promotion. Trophies are a material expression of killed wild animals, whose shooting quality, tracking and suffering rarely appear in the official picture.
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 contemporary approach to wildlife. 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 violence system emerges, in which killings and animal carcasses are part of a marketing system.
Those who kill senselessly do not protect, and it serves no purpose for civilized society. Hobby hunters therefore do not ensure healthy or natural wildlife populations, especially 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 officials in municipalities, cities and cantons to fundamentally reconsider such events. A civilized society does not need competitions where dead wildlife are presented as achievements, and it does not need a market where pelts are traded like ordinary commodities. Instead, what is needed is a respectful understanding of wildlife, professionally grounded wildlife ecology and a departure from recreational hunting.