Hubertus celebration in the Pfynwald: the Church must not sanctify recreational hunting

On Tuesday, 3 November 2026, the feast day of Saint Hubertus, recreational hunters from Valais will gather at 7.30 pm for the Valais Hubertus celebration in the Pfynwald. According to the public announcement, the parish priest of Leuk-Susten will celebrate the service bilingually in the open air. It will be accompanied musically by the hunting-horn group «Pfynwald» and the «Oberwalliser Jäger- und Naturfreunde Chor». The Dianas are called upon to appear with their association standards.

Christian faith and recreational hunting are diametrically opposed. The founding scene of Christianity is the manger: a child born between an ox and a donkey, surrounded by animals that are not prey but companions. Christianity begins with an image of peace between humans and animals, not with the hunting call. Anyone who stands in this tradition cannot make the pursuit, wounding and killing of sentient wild animals the subject of a religious service.

The IG Wild beim Wild criticises the fact that the Church is making its service available for a hunting spectacle. Hunting-horn music, hunting associations and hunting rituals are not neutral decoration. They stand for a culture of pursuing, wounding and killing wild animals. When churches integrate these symbols into worship, recreational hunting is given religious and moral legitimacy. This contradicts the Christian commitment to mercy, non-violence and responsibility for creation.

Nor does the invocation of Saint Hubertus hold up. The historical Hubertus of Liège was an 8th-century bishop. The well-known story of the stag with a cross between its antlers was only attributed to him many centuries later and actually originates from the legend of Saint Eustace. In this narrative, a hunter is not affirmed in his actions: he abandons the hunt, throws away his weapon and changes his life. To use precisely this story of conversion as legitimation for a hunting-themed religious service turns its core meaning into its opposite.

The location makes the celebration all the more questionable. The Pfynwald lies within the Pfyn-Finges Nature Park, an area that stands for the protection of nature and wild animals. It is precisely there that recreational hunters from Valais parade with association standards and hunting horns. And this in a canton that wants to be the first canton to shoot lynx, even though the species is genetically at its limit. A petition “No lynx kills in Valais”.

Wild animals are not a backdrop, nor an endlessly renewable resource. They are sentient beings with social structures. Roe deer, red deer, foxes and many other species live in family groups, raise their young over months and maintain close bonds. Recreational hunting tears these groups apart. When a mother is shot, her young starve or are orphaned. Anyone who kills parent animals in autumn and winter in many cases also kills their offspring, only more slowly and out of sight.

Recreational hunting is not harmless folklore. For wild animals it means pursuit, mortal fear, injury and death. And it often does not end with a clean shot. In Grisons, one of the few cantons that keep records of follow-up searches, every tenth red deer is merely wounded rather than killed outright. The success rate of follow-up searches ranges between 35 and 65 percent, depending on the canton. This means that up to half of wounded animals die without release, often over hours or days. The Foundation for the Animal in Law estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 fleeing wild animals occur annually across Switzerland. These figures reveal what hunting horns and uniforms obscure.

Recreational hunting does not only kill animals. It regularly claims human lives too. On the weekend of 5 September 2026 alone, two recreational hunters during a hunt in Ticino on the same day. Statistically speaking, a hunting accident occurs in Switzerland every 29 hours. The official count only began in the year 2000 and includes neither the dead of the decades before nor the many cases that, as homicide or extended suicide committed with a legal hunting weapon, are not counted as a “hunting accident” at all. Across Europe, the number of victims runs into the hundreds. A leisure pursuit that costs the lives of people and animals does not belong in a church service.

There is another way. IG Wild beim Wild advocates professional, science-based wildlife management modelled on the the canton of Geneva. There, recreational hunting has been banned since 1974. Where intervention is necessary, trained state game wardens act in a targeted, controlled way on a professional basis, not because the hunting season has just opened for a particular species and shooting for pleasure is permitted. This model shows that protecting people, wild animals and habitats requires expertise, not leisure hunting, and certainly not a church blessing for it.

The IG Wild beim Wild calls on those responsible at the parish concerned to refrain from giving recreational hunting a religious endorsement. Churches should be places where compassion and the protection of vulnerable beings prevail, not places where violence against wild animals is aestheticised with hunting horns and religious symbolism.

Animals do not need the church's blessing for their persecution. They need protection.

The details of time, place and participants come from the public event announcement in the hunting press and were documented on 19 October 2026.

For the Hubertus Mass, IG Wild beim Wild has released the song “Warum jagst du mich” (“Why do you hunt me”). It is about recreational hunters who, weapons in hand, go to get the church's blessing, and it recalls that, according to the legend, Hubertus gave up hunting. Like all Anti-Hunting Songs it is free to use.

You will find more background on recreational hunting in Switzerland and its consequences for wild animals and people in the dossier Recreational hunting as an event, in the category Hunting and the category Wild animals on wildbeimwild.com.