Podcast episode: Hunting, violence and wild animals

When a proponent of recreational hunting calls itself an “institute”, a legal wolf kill reshuffles an entire pack, and no one asks whether a perpetrator was a recreational hunter: this episode leads through three fields — the rhetoric of hunting associations, the pressure on wild animals, and violence in the environment of recreational hunting, from South Africa to the Swiss wardrobe.

Association Rhetoric Fact-Checked

Dr Wolfgang Lipps, managing director of the “JUN.i Institut für Jagd, Umwelt und Naturschutz”, accuses the German Hunting Association of defending recreational hunting poorly, and offers his own arguments. The fact check shows: this is not a neutral research institute speaking, but a proponent who benefits economically from recreational hunting. His core argument — that the principle of “eat and be eaten” legitimises hunting — is a naturalistic fallacy: what happens in nature does not imply what humans ought to do. The figures, too, need putting into perspective. Germany counts around 467,000 holders of hunting licences, but only an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 are regularly active.

Wolf, Fox and Lynx Under Pressure

In the Valais Chablais pack, 2025 marked the first time in Switzerland that a mother and daughter reproduced with the same male. According to KORA, this was triggered by the legal kill of the alpha male M88 in January 2024. Rather than weakening the pack, the intervention restructured it: eight pups in two litters. Meanwhile, Glarus rejected a petition that merely called for a report on the scientific basis of fox hunting, even though around 20,000 foxes are killed across Switzerland every year. In the Lynx, road traffic accidents are the most common cause of death, poaching is underestimated, and congenital heart defects resulting from genetic impoverishment were found in four free-living animals. In the Lesachtal, six griffon vultures were poisoned with carbofuran, which has been banned since 2008. The Ethical Wildlife Travel Guide summarises the situation: 25 out of 26 cantons are under hunting pressure, only Geneva is not.

Violence in the context of recreational hunting

At the Leeuwfontein trophy hunting estate north of Pretoria, two people were killed by gunfire in early June, including the shipping-company heiress Caroline von Rantzau. In Styria, a hunting-ground owner left a dead body lying in the forest for a decade so as not to disturb the wild animals. In the Fabian case, a recreational hunter used his thermal imaging camera to locate the body without calling the police. The act itself has nothing to do with recreational hunting, but it raises the question of what threshold applies when someone finds a dead person. In Switzerland, around 30,000 recreational hunters store an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 hunting weapons in private households, usually without the legally required gun safe. Whether a perpetrator was a recreational hunter is not systematically recorded in cases of domestic homicide. And in Spreitenbach, the municipality responded to a petition about animal welfare shortcomings at the hunting fair with six weeks of silence, followed by a criminal complaint against the platform that had made the grievances public.

Further background information in the category Crime & hunting.