Psychology of recreational hunting in Canton St. Gallen

In Canton St. Gallen, recreational hunting operates like a laboratory experiment testing how much culling pressure, how many enemy narratives and how much bureaucratic absurdity a democracy can withstand. Under the guise of regulation and tradition, a system is operated that treats wild animals like production factors, glorifies hobby hunters as conservationists and tells the public with astonishing audacity that this is wildlife management.

Wild beim Wild Editorial Team — 12 February 2026

The extended hunting season until New Year's Eve is not an operational accident in Canton St. Gallen but programme.

When weather and snowfall dampen hunting success, the Office for Nature, recreational hunting and Fisheries does not understand this as protection for exhausted wild animals, but as grounds to extend the season and organise driven hunts. Where others would speak of animal welfare, in St. Gallen they think in target numbers, fulfilment rates and emphasis.

Legally provocative is that wild animals are declared as ownerless, but recreational hunting of them is conducted like a controllable production process. Those who keep pushing hunting seasons further into winter while simultaneously increasing hunting pressure structurally accept that stress, missed shots and agonizing tracking of wounded animals become part of the system. From the perspective of contemporary animal protection law, this is not wildlife policy but systematically organized escalation.

Hunting season until New Year's Eve: Shooting pressure instead of wildlife management

Hunting administration as a stage for recreational hunters

Anyone who examines the team of the St. Gallen Hunting Department and the hunting administration dossier side by side quickly recognizes: This was not a specialist committee for wildlife law that was established, but an office for hunting and nonsense. The staffing with a lying hunter as department head, who has distinguished himself through manipulative communication and hunting advocacy work, is symbolic of this.

Psychologically, this administration operates less as an independent authority and more as an extended arm of recreational hunting. Loyalty to the scene seems more important than loyalty to the law, science is selectively cited when it fits the narrative and ignored when it interferes. Instead of a rule-of-law culture of error correction, a milieu emerges in which people mutually confirm each other while credibility implodes outside.

St. Gallen hunting administration: Wolf management without science and without credibility

The wolf as a projection screen for fear and power

The wolf in the Canton of St. Gallen is not only a biological predator, but a legal stress test for administration and politics. The unlawful shooting permit exemplifies how little respect there can be for rule-of-law standards when hunting desires press forward. Instead of taking the law seriously, the wolf was made a political football until a court had to explain to the hunting authority what legal foundations are.

Psychologically, this reveals much about the actors' understanding of power. Those who authorize the shooting of a protected predator despite inadequate prerequisites want to demonstrate: We have the final word, not the law, not biology, and certainly not the wolf. This resembles feudal hunting privileges rather than modern wildlife law oriented toward proportionality and fundamental rights.

Public dumbing-down as a business model

The public communication about recreational hunting in the Canton of St. Gallen shows a familiar pattern: complex ecological relationships are reduced to simple slogans. Instead of speaking differentially about habitats, forestry, climate change and agriculture, emotions and catchwords like 'problem wolf,' 'damage' and 'regulation' dominate. This is precisely where the concept of 'public dumbing-down' comes into play.

Psychologically, this business model functions through constant bombardment: Those who repeat long enough that wild animals are fruit waiting for harvest, and that without recreational hunters one would sink into chaos, create a mental climate in which violence is supposed to appear as care. It becomes legally problematic when authorities mirror these narratives in their communication and thus help relativize elementary animal protection principles. Part of the population is lured through fear scenarios, half-truths and selective numbers into a simple story in which recreational hunters appear as action-oriented problem solvers. Those who ask questions, demand scientific evidence or point to animal ethics disrupt this narrative and are therefore marginalized. This stabilizes a milieu that depends on approval but shuns honest debates.

Public dumbing-down in the Canton of St. Gallen

Patent hunting of red deer: When increased culling becomes ideology

The discussion about patent hunting of red deer in St. Gallen exemplifies how a simple action logic can become self-perpetuating: When conflicts arise, shooting takes place. Instead of analyzing causes, recreational hunting itself is presented as the main instrument of 'solution'.

Psychologically, this strategy provides the hunting milieu with security: One can do something, and this action is familiar. That high culling numbers do not automatically lead to fewer conflicts, but create new problems, does not fit with the self-perception of recreational hunters. Therefore, contradictory data is ignored, relativized, or dismissed as 'falsely interpreted'. Thus a tool becomes an ideology that evades scientific revision.

Patent hunting as solution against red deer conflicts?

Fox and badger massacre: Desensitization and devaluation

The online dossier on the 'fox and badger massacre' in St. Gallen illuminates the dark side of a hunting culture in which certain animal species are factually devalued. Foxes and badgers no longer appear as social, sentient individuals, but as abstract 'populations' that must be 'kept down'. The more deeply this devaluation is internalized, the easier it becomes to carry out killing as routine action.

From a psychological perspective, this is a classic desensitization process. Empathy is trained away by reducing the animal to numbers and functions. At the same time, the positive self-image remains intact: The recreational hunter sees himself as 'beneficial', who 'prevents damage', while the suffering of the animals is made invisible. Such mechanisms stand in open contradiction to modern animal ethics, which recognizes the individuality and capacity for suffering of wild animals.

St. Gallen: Stop the fox and badger massacre

Wolf hunting in Russia: Disinhibition as continuing education

The participation of St. Gallen department head Dominik Thiel in a wolf hunt in Russia, sold as continuing education, shows the next escalation level of this hunting psychology. Instead of dealing with livestock protection, jurisprudence or modern wildlife ecology, one travels to a country that is under sanctions because of an illegal war of aggression, to experience driven hunts on wolves and small animals there. An alleged method testing of lap hunting thus becomes a trophy and experience trip.

The images are unambiguous: With small caliber rifles, grey squirrels are shot from trees for target practice, while in Switzerland one simultaneously speaks of protection and regulation. This has nothing to do with wildlife management, respect or science, but points to deeply seated disinhibition and a concerning shift of moral boundaries. Anyone who wants to sharpen their 'professional competence' in such an environment documents above all one thing: that their own reference frame for ethics and animal welfare has long since shifted.

Precisely against this background, the reassurances from St. Gallen politics that one must tolerate goal conflicts appear like an invitation to further boundary shifting. When officials who participate in lap hunts and use small mammals for target practice simultaneously decide on the protection of wolf and wildlife, the question of suitability is not an activism reflex, but a democratic necessity.

Instead of dealing with wolf, livestock protection and wildlife ecology within the framework of their own law and Swiss reality, department heads and game wardens travel to Russia, where four wolves are shot within a few days. This appears more like trophy hunting than like serious continuing education.

The claimed learning effect is professionally and legally weak: Battue hunting is not implementable in Switzerland for animal welfare and legal reasons, as critics emphasize. Training whose core method cannot even be applied here undermines the argument of professional competence.

Politically and in the media, the image emerges of an administration that aligns itself too closely with hunting recreational interests. Environmental organizations and political parties speak of insensitive behavior and lack of scientific rigor, which weakens trust in the office's independence.

Together with unlawful wolf culling orders and other scandals, the Russia trip fits into a pattern: a hunting administration that acts at the expense of taxpayers and its own credibility, whose priorities are far removed from modern, legally compliant wildlife policy.

Controversy over Swiss officials participating in wolf hunt in Russia

Scandals, 'lying hunters' and the rotten apple

The affairs surrounding a 'lying hunter' as department head and the proverbial 'rotten apple' in the St. Gallen hunting administration show how strongly group loyalty stands above professional integrity. Those who belong to the hunting milieu are protected, even when credibility is massively damaged. Admitting mistakes or consistently removing those responsible would call the entire system into question.

From a psychological perspective, this is ingroup protection: external criticism is experienced as an attack on one's own identity, not as an opportunity for improvement. Thus the focus shifts from the factual level (correct administration, legal certainty, animal welfare) to defending the group. The consequence is a loss of trust in authorities and the perception that different rules apply to recreational hunters than to the rest of the population.

Hunting education and cognitive dissonance

When the Office for Nature, Hunting and Fisheries 'modernizes' its hunting education, this appears at first glance to be progress. From a psychological perspective, however, it is often about further stabilizing the self-image of recreational hunters: they define themselves through supposed 'examinations,' 'competencies' and 'expertise,' while the core of the activity - killing animals for recreational motives - remains untouched.

Cognitive dissonance is at work here: the recreational hunter wants to see himself as a responsible conservationist, not as someone who kills sentient beings for a hobby. This internal tension is reduced by emphasizing examinations, courses and official certificates while discrediting criticism as uninformed. Articles about figures like hobby hunter Simon Meier illustrate how far such self-deceptions can go when amplified by media.

Office for Hunting and Nonsense in St. Gallen modernizes hunting education

St. Gallen as mirror of a hunting cultural crisis

The psychology of recreational hunting in Canton St. Gallen is not a local special case, but a lens for a nationwide cultural crisis of recreational hunting. Culling pressure until New Year's Eve, wolf hunting as a symbol of power, patent hunting as a reflex solution, fox and badger massacres, administration scandals and training that primarily polishes the hunting self-image - all of this forms a picture of control, fear defense and denial of reality.

Where science, animal ethics and democratic oversight are taken seriously, this system would have to be fundamentally questioned. Instead, it defends itself with populism, enemy stereotypes and the same repeated claim that nature would collapse without hobby hunters. This is precisely where a responsible public must intervene: it sees through the psychological mechanisms and demands wildlife management that does not treat animals as targets for recreational entertainment, but as fellow creatures in a shared habitat.

More in the dossier: Psychology of Hunting

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