Petition: Protect minors from hobby hunting – enforce effective sanctions for violations
Children and young people have a right to physical and mental integrity. This includes not exposing them to the violence of hobby hunting, whether as passive onlookers or active participants. We call on the Federal Council to create a clear legal basis that prohibits minors from taking part in hunting activities and effectively sanctions violations.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child protects children from being confronted with violence against animals
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated in «General Comment No. 26» (2023) that children must be protected from physical and psychological violence as well as from being confronted with violence inflicted on animals. This principle is based on Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees protection from any form of violence and obliges the states party to it.
What matters is how this principle is applied in practice. The Committee does not leave it at an abstract formula, but has repeatedly applied it to a concrete, legally permitted form of animal killing: bullfighting.
Precedent case Spain: from principle to law
As early as 2018, the Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that Spain exclude under-18s from active and passive participation in bullfighting events, in order to protect them from the harmful effects of this violence. The recommendation was based on a scientifically grounded report by the Fondation Franz Weber.
In January 2026, the Committee renewed this demand during Spain's periodic review in Geneva, this time explicitly naming bullfighting in the section on «violence against children». It recommended setting a minimum age of 18, without exception, for participation in bullfighting events, festivals and schools, at both national and regional level. The effect is concrete: Spain has since been pushing forward a legal reform that would ban minors from watching and participating in events involving violence against animals, embedded within the comprehensive child protection act.
This refutes the crucial objection that nothing can be derived from the UN principle for concrete, legal killing practices. The Committee itself has done exactly that. A detailed documentation of this case can be found in the article «The UN wants to protect minors from the violence of bullfighting».
Precedent case Poland: the slaughterhouse argument
Poland, too, shows that children's rights and hunting can very well be considered together. When hunting associations there tried to push through a law to «promote hunting tradition», intended to introduce children to hobby hunting, the plan failed due to resistance from children's rights officers, the education ministry and experts. One argument was central, as our article «Poland's path towards banning hunting in the presence of minors» documents: schools do not take children into slaughterhouses. By the same logic, children must not be taken to scenes of violence in the forest either.
This argument gets to the heart of the matter. No one would think of taking ten-year-olds through a slaughterhouse to introduce them to the butcher's trade, even though that is where the vast majority of meat actually consumed comes from. No curriculum, no butchers' association, no parental home does this, and youth labour protection law legally keeps minors away from precisely these activities. Society has therefore long since decided that witnessing the killing of animals is not something for children, even where it serves food production.
Why, then, should hobby hunting of all things be the exception, where killing happens for pleasure and not even to secure food supply? The more useful and everyday a killing is, the more self-evident the protection of children. The more superfluous and leisure-based the killing, the louder the call that children may as well be present. This asymmetry cannot be justified.
What science shows
Numerous studies show that witnessing violence against animals can impair children's capacity for empathy, lead to desensitisation towards suffering, and be linked to later psychosocial problems. An overview of this can be found in the dossier «Psychology of hobby hunting», and the article «Children, hunting and the socialisation of violence» describes how accompanied witnessing of killing conveys to children the message that empathy is negotiable.
The protection gap in Switzerland
Switzerland has so far failed to implement this protective mandate in the area of hobby hunting. There is no nationwide, uniform regulation that effectively protects minors from participating in hunting activities and from witnessing the killing of wild animals. On the contrary: hunting associations actively court minors, appear in schools and take children along on hobby hunts. This is described in detail in the articles «No to lessons taught by hobby hunters in schools» and «Violence in schools – and hobby hunters?» and in the open letter to the Federal Council: «No minors on hobby hunts».
Our demand
What Spain, under international pressure, is currently putting into law, and what Poland has already fended off, must also apply in Switzerland. We call on the Federal Council to create a clear legal basis that prohibits minors from active and passive participation in hunting activities and effectively sanctions violations.
Dear Federal Councillor Rösti
I am writing to you because I am deeply concerned about the participation of minors in hobby hunting in Switzerland.
In 2023, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated in its «General Comment No. 26» that children must be protected from every form of physical and psychological violence as well as from exposure to violence, including violence against animals. As a state party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Switzerland is obliged to effectively guarantee all minors' rights to protection and physical and mental integrity.
The passive or active participation of children and young people in hunting activities – whether as onlookers or through assistance and shooting practice as part of hobby hunting – is incompatible with this protective mandate. Scientific research indicates that witnessing violence against animals can be linked to an impairment of the capacity for empathy, desensitisation to suffering, and an increased risk of later psychosocial problems. A compilation of relevant findings can be found in the dossier «Psychology of hobby hunting».
Although hunting in Switzerland is regulated and enforced at cantonal level in key respects, a nationwide, binding minimum standard of protection for minors is needed. Within its legislative competence, the federal government should ensure that children and young people are effectively protected from situations in which violence against animals – particularly in the context of hobby hunting activities – is conveyed as normal, necessary or acceptable. Federal law regulates, among other things, cantonal hunting entitlements; however, this does not in itself establish a uniform protective standard regarding the participation of minors in hunting activities.
I therefore call on you to:
explicitly ban the active and passive participation of minors in hobby hunting at federal level, in particular joining hunts, shooting, follow-up searches, and presence at killings;
create a clear legal basis for effective and proportionate sanctions against hobby hunters and hunting organisations when they allow minors to participate in hunting activities;
effectively implement the child protection obligations set out in «General Comment No. 26» in the area of hobby hunting, and ensure that minors in Switzerland are not exposed to violence against animals.
Yours sincerely
Add your voice now
Your signature counts.
I signed because...
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«I condemn the killing of animals in any form. Trying to brutalise children at a young age is a no-go! Where are we headed?? Respect for all animals!!»
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«Access to living beings that own themselves is robbery or abduction, and deliberate killing is, under criminal law, murder... so here, animal murder. Whoever believes they can grant themselves and others a right to this... is ethically and legally-ethically an unacceptable person. Hunters are likewise an unacceptable professional group. To now also strip children of their logical and natural revulsion towards killing and murdering is, pedagogically, not a sustainable approach in terms of world peace, the containment of violence, is anti-scientific and not necessary at all. These dignity-diminishing individuals have no ethical right, no property right, and therefore also no professional right to their predatory, murderous activity, and passing on these criminally relevant acts... to children or young people... or anyone else, is not acceptable to any degree whatsoever.»
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«It's already bad enough that adults make hunting their hobby and take pleasure in killing animals. Children shouldn't be dragged into this too.»
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«Because I find it very concerning to confront children with killing and hunting at such a young age. It would be better to teach them animal welfare instead.»
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«I absolutely reject hunting.»
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«I am signing because I consider hunting a perversion, a form of lust murder – anyone who feels joy at killing animals can only be mentally disturbed! Exceptions are, of course, indigenous peoples, who may have no other way of feeding themselves.»
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«Brutality and violence towards animals should be strictly punished. Children must not be confronted with this brutality as if it were normal to turn bullfighting, hunting, or the murder of thousands of stray animals in Turkey, Morocco, Romania and many other countries into an event. This brutality destroys children's souls. And not only children's.»
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«Hunting itself already represents violence against sentient beings – animals killed without reasonable cause, purely for fun – and it causes children, whose minds are still developing, to lose all natural empathy as a result, as well as becoming brutalised themselves.»
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«....children matter just as much to me as animals do! Both should be protected from this passion for hunting.»
Read more (2)
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«Because children must not be raised to become animal killers.»
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«THIS MISERABLE HUNTING SHOULD BE ABOLISHED IMMEDIATELY, and hunters who take their children hunting with them should be PUNISHED!!!»