Neuchâtel: Hunting drunk is now prohibited
The blood alcohol level of recreational hunters is now limited to 0.5 per mille.
In the canton of Neuchâtel, alcohol consumption during recreational hunting has been restricted since the beginning of the year.
The five Neuchâtel game wardens will check the sobriety of recreational hunters using breathalyser tests from the coming season onwards.
The canton of Neuchâtel is thus the first French-speaking canton and the second in Switzerland (after Zurich) to introduce an alcohol limit of 0.5 per mille for hunting. Violations may result in the revocation of the hunting licence for one to five years.
Revocation of the hunting licence
The game wardens are trained and equipped by the Neuchâtel police. According to the Office for Wildlife, these legal changes were adopted “to strengthen the credibility of recreational hunters.”
In the crosshairs
The Neuchâtel reform stems from an incident in which a recreational hunter took aim at a mountain biker after having “had a few beers.”
Two years after this incident, the mountain biker was ordered to pay the recreational hunter compensation of 4’500 francs for having insulted him on Facebook. More on the topic of crime and hunting.
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More on the subject of recreational hunting: What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
