Podcast episode: Hunting, wildlife and conflicts

This week the Wild beim Wild editorial team documents a dense news situation from three countries – with a common pattern: protection standards are coming under political pressure, and in the end it is the general public that bears both the ecological and the financial costs.

Hunting law in Italy, Germany and Switzerland

In Italy, the Senate adopted the controversial reform DDL 1552 by 80 votes to 56 – despite a papal statement, 400’000 signatories to a petition and warnings from the EU Commission. The law expands hunting in protected areas, weakens the scientific advisory body ISPRA and would substantially expand the use of live decoy birds. The EU sees breaches of the Birds and Habitats Directives; an infringement procedure is already under way.

In Lower Saxony, a new hunting act came into force at the same time, bringing improvements such as the ban on earth hunting and an increased training requirement – but also abolishing the annual kill quotas for roe deer. More oversight on the one hand, less state population management on the other.

In Switzerland, the Federal Council plans to allow wolves to be shot in future even in protected reserves and during the closed season – although studies show that lethal intervention often does not reduce conflicts with livestock. In the canton of Fribourg, the government is siding with the hobby hunters – while its own figures prove that in 2025/26 the wildlife wardens alone killed four times as many wild boars as the summer hunt.

Wild animals under pressure from heat and noise

The Swiss heatwave of 2026, with regional temperatures of up to 38 degrees, coincides with the roe deer rut. During this phase roe bucks barely feed and are particularly dependent on water and thermal refuges. Nevertheless, the rutting hunt takes place during this period. For fishing there are temperature-based closed seasons – for terrestrial game such thresholds are entirely absent.

Added to this is the stress factor of fireworks: loud private fireworks hit wild animals that are already under chronic stress from hobby hunting. The fireworks initiative, on which a vote is expected to take place at the end of 2026, should be read in this context. And predators such as wolf and lynx demonstrate at the Calanda massif what regulatory nature can achieve: after the wolf pack returned, young growth was once again visible in age classes that had been missing for decades.

Hunting practice in court and under scrutiny

Since mid-June, a 60-year-old hobby hunter has been standing trial before the regional court in Heilbronn. The charge is attempted murder: he is alleged to have stretched wire cables across a mountain bike trail in order to drive recreation-seekers out of his hunting ground. The verdict is expected at the end of July. Comparable cases from Austria in 2018 and the Heilbronn area in 2024 show that this is not an isolated incident.

In France, three hobby hunters were convicted because they tried to snatch the mobile phone from an activist with which he was filming a par force hunt. The verdict confirms: anyone documenting a public activity in the state forest is acting lawfully.

In the canton of Zurich, a citizen confronted the cantonal hunting authority with a peer-reviewed study from the specialist journal «Biological Conservation», which puts the annual costs of fox hunting in France at 103 to 123 million euros – against officially reported damage costs of 8 to 23 million. The authority's representative described the source as «certainly not serious». The canton of Zug, on the basis of the independent SWILD study, has decided no longer to proactively promote fox hunting. Zurich has not.

In Nidwalden, the higher court convicted a hobby hunter who had killed two red deer around 15 minutes after the end of the shooting period – total costs: 8’270 francs.

In Grisons, the night-hunting pilot project is being extended to wild boars. 22 hobby hunters selected by lot are allowed to wait at night in the Mesolcina – a region that is demonstrably contaminated with caesium-137 from the Chernobyl fallout. Anyone who consumes the meat privately is exempt from the measuring obligation. And the pilot project names no success criterion.

In Aargau, 39 new hobby hunters were certified at Habsburg Castle; a member of the cantonal parliament from the farmers' association thanked them for their efforts «to keep the ecosystem in balance» – without defining which balance and measured against what.

Finally, a question of origin: an Engadin butcher's shop markets a red deer sausage as a regional speciality – 51 per cent of the meat comes from New Zealand. Around two thirds of the game meat sold in Switzerland comes from abroad. Between the romantic image of regional game and the reality on the packaging lie entire continents.