Poland shows how criticism of hunting can become politically effective

In the middle of Europe, Poland is fighting against a hunting act dating from the People's Republic.

An alliance around Olga Tokarczuk and Agnieszka Holland now wants to use 100,000 signatures to force through what the hobby hunting lobby has been blocking for decades: safety for residents, an end to the trophy industry and the right to a forest without gunshots. Poland is thus becoming a lesson in hunting-critical politics for all of Europe, including Switzerland.

A ghost of the People's Republic in the Polish forest

Poland has been a democracy for over three decades. The hunting act, by contrast, dates at its core from 1995 and is, in its fundamentals, a direct legacy of the Polish People's Republic (PRL). Wild animals there are still regarded as the property of the state, the country is divided across its entire surface into hunting districts, and the quasi-state-run Polish hobby hunting association (PZŁ) administers these districts like a self-service shop. As a landowner who has a moral problem with the killing of animals, you have hardly any recourse under the law as it stands. An alliance of scientists, artists and environmentalists now wants to change what the political establishment is sitting out.

At the head of the movement stand two of Poland's best-known voices: Nobel laureate in literature Olga Tokarczuk, whose novel «Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead» made the senseless killing of animals by hobby hunters the theme of an entire generation, and director Agnieszka Holland, who presented the material in 2017 as the eco-thriller «Spoor» at the Berlinale, receiving the Silver Bear for it. Magdalena Gałkiewicz of the Polish Green Party sums up the thrust of the initiative: the current system is anachronistic and contradicts everything known today about animal welfare and ecology.

100,000 signatures on paper: democracy as an acid test

To circumvent the veto power of the hobby hunting lobby in parliament, the initiators are relying on the “civil legislative initiative”. The procedure is as laborious as it sounds: first, 1’000 handwritten signatures must be collected just to register the committee. After that, exactly three months remain to gather a further 99’000 signatures. In the age of digital petitions, Poland sticks to ink and paper. The advantage: such a citizens' initiative knows no “discontinuity”. If it is not passed during the current legislative period, it automatically carries over into the next. It is precisely this persistence that the hobby hunting association fears.

700 metres instead of 150: when wind turbines need more distance than rifles

Perhaps the most scandalous point of the current legal situation does not even concern the animals, but the residents. Today, hobby hunters in Poland are allowed to fire high-powered rifles from as little as 150 metres from residential buildings. The initiative calls for raising this distance to 700 metres, measured from any building, including schools and kindergartens. Gałkiewicz puts the absurdity very clearly: wind turbines in Poland have to keep a distance of 700 metres because they cause noise, whereas a deadly firearm may be discharged just 150 metres from a child's bedroom window. Over the past ten years, 28 people in Poland have died in hunting-related incidents. A large majority of the population, around 89 per cent, demands mandatory medical and psychological tests for all hobby hunters.

An end to the “killing industry”

The initiative puts particular pressure on commercial hobby hunting in Poland. Estimates speak of around 12’000 foreign trophy hunters travelling to Poland every year. Some sources even assume up to 25’000 paying shooting guests. The state forests operate their own online shops in which killing appointments can be bought like concert tickets. Poland thus becomes the backdrop for an industry that, according to critics, treats the country “like a third-world country” in which anything can be killed as long as the price is right. The reform seeks to dry up this market. The legal basis for this is strikingly simple: under the constitution, wild animals belong to the state, not to private foreign-currency earners or foreign guests with a taste for antlers.

The right to a forest without gunshots

The second central demand of the initiative concerns the right to a forest without hobby hunting. A 1952 decree by the Stalinist head of state Bolesław Bierut had effectively nationalised wild animals and obliged private landowners to tolerate hobby hunters on their land. To this day, private individuals can opt out on grounds of conscience, but legal entities such as foundations, conservation organisations or forest kindergartens do not have this right. They must look on as roe deer, wild boars and birds are shot directly outside their windows. The initiative aims to end this anachronistic compulsion. NGOs and municipalities should be able to permanently remove their land from the hobby hunting districts.

In doing so, the Polish reform ties in directly with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. In the case of Herrmann v. Germany (2012), the ECtHR ruled that landowners may not be forced to tolerate hobby hunting on their land without objection if it contradicts their ethical convictions. The legal architecture on which the Polish citizens' initiative is built is therefore not a national quirk, but a European human right. Those who criticise hobby hunting are not arguing «against nature», but for property, freedom of conscience and proportionality.

The «invisible network» in the Sejm

The road is rocky, for in the Polish parliament there operates what activists call the «invisible network». Only a handful of MPs openly profess to be in favour of hobby hunting, yet the association's influence reaches considerably further. The situation has become all the more explosive since President Karol Nawrocki appointed, of all people, Marcin Możdżonek, the president of the National Hobby Hunting Council, as his adviser on climate and the environment. This effectively programmes a presidential veto against any serious reform. Poland is experiencing an open conflict between a reform-minded civil society and a lobby that has been firmly entrenched in the state apparatus since the communist era.

Baiting, night vision, trophies: what the initiative really wants to ban

For all the force of the demands, this is not about a general ban on hobby hunting, but about taming a practice that has spun out of control. Specifically, the initiative seeks to prohibit the luring of wild animals with bait, to ban shooting at night using thermal imaging optics, and to have the list of huntable species scientifically reviewed. Today, as Gałkiewicz mockingly puts it, hobby hunting plans in Poland are negotiated «etween the lord of the manor, the bailiff and the parson», that is, in closed meetings between hobby hunters and foresters. In future, these plans are to be subject to public consultation and scientific oversight. In other words: Poland's forests should once again belong to all citizens, and not just to the 127,000 members of the hobby hunting association.

What Switzerland can learn from Poland

For Switzerland, the Polish case is interesting because it shows how hunting-critical resistance becomes legally effective. The Polish campaign did not win with nature romanticism or moral appeals, but with precise legal argumentation: protection of residents, protection of children, protection of property and freedom of conscience. It is precisely this shift from the folklore debate to the question of fundamental rights that the Swiss hobby hunting lobby fears most.

The Polish reform of 2018, which banished minors from hobby hunting, arose not from a moral outcry but from a tangible legal contradiction between the Animal Welfare Act of 1997 and the older hunting law. The pattern repeats itself: whoever cleanly identifies legal loopholes throws the hobby hunting lobby onto the defensive. In Switzerland the legal situation varies greatly from canton to canton, which requires a clean distinction between licence hunting and territorial hunting. The lever of «property and fundamental rights» works here just as it does there. Where a private individual, a foundation or a municipality wishes to oppose hobby hunting on their own land, this is not a matter of taste, but a question of proportionality.

Poland as a stress test for the whole of Europe

The citizens' initiative is more than a national reform project. It is a litmus test for the question of whether organised civil society can dislodge an entrenched hobby hunting lobby in an EU state. In recent years Poland has already shown several times that such shifts are possible: from the ban on fur farming to the first reform steps against hobby hunting through to the removal of five bird species from the hunting list. If commercial trophy hobby hunting is now also abolished, the protective distance from residential houses is increased fivefold and municipalities can once again have their forests free of shooting, a piece of hobby hunting mentality will collapse — one that also shapes the debate in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The message from Warsaw is unequivocal: hobby hunting is neither a law of nature nor a cultural constant. It is a political agreement that can be changed when 100,000 citizens put their names to it.