Psychology of recreational hunting in the Canton of Lucerne

In the Canton of Lucerne, territorial hunting operates like an administrative system that considers itself indispensable while failing to provide proof of its necessity. Under the guise of territory management, culling plans and alleged wildlife management, an apparatus is maintained that administers wildlife as a resource, stages hobby hunters as nature guardians and explains to the public that this is precisely what modern wildlife management looks like. Territorial hunting in Lucerne organizes its structures as a political network that directly intervenes in cantonal legislative revisions.

Editorial Wild beim Wild — February 20, 2026

What is legally problematic: Wildlife is legally considered ownerless, yet recreational hunting of them is conducted like a taxable production process.

Those who build culling quotas into lease contracts while simultaneously speaking of wildlife management structurally accept that it is not the state of the ecosystem that decides when enough has been shot, but the degree of fulfillment of an administrative objective. This is not wildlife policy. This is hunting planning with a protective veneer.

Lucerne as a contrasting case: Why are the wild boar missing?

The canton of Lucerne borders the cantons of Zurich, Aargau, Bern and Solothurn, which are heavily populated by wild boar, and yet colonization in the canton of Lucerne has not really taken place over the past 20 years, even though hunting bags have increased almost everywhere in these same cantons. This is an empirically relevant finding: increased hunting pressure in neighboring cantons has not reduced wild boar populations, but apparently redirected or displaced them. Anyone taking this finding seriously would have to fundamentally question the core thesis of recreational hunting, namely that more culling regulates populations.

But that is precisely what is not happening. When a wild boar sounder with piglets established itself at the Rigi for the first time in autumn 2025, the Department of Agriculture and Forestry immediately reacted with the reflex 'prevention plus hunting' — electric fences and targeted hunting are now more important than ever. No one asks why 20 years of intensive recreational hunting in neighboring cantons have not prevented the spread. This is how an administration functions that is designed for confirmation rather than insight.

Why recreational hunting fails as population control

The lynx: protection promises without substance

The number of lynx in the canton of Lucerne is declining despite the presence of suitable habitats. This is one of the silent catastrophes of Lucerne's wildlife policy: a strictly protected animal for whose protection the canton officially stands is disappearing from suitable habitat, and the administration conducts no recognizable critical analysis of causes.

Psychologically, this indifference reveals a great deal. Where the lynx is disruptive because it takes roe deer that the hobby hunters claim for themselves, it is not a partner but competition. A decline in lynx populations does not trigger an alarm reaction in hunting circles, but quiet relief. The administration, which is closely intertwined with this milieu, has no institutional incentive to loudly declare this decline a problem. This creates a wildlife policy that protects on paper and looks away in practice.

Studies on the impact of recreational hunting on wildlife

Territory hunting as a loyalty system

The territory hunting system in the canton of Lucerne is based on lease contracts that hunting associations conclude for multi-year periods. This structure creates a close intertwining between authorities, lessees and the hunting lobby: whoever has the territory also has the interpretive authority over wildlife populations in the area. Whoever shoots too little risks the lease contract.

Psychologically, this is a classic insider model: access to resources creates loyalty, loyalty protects access. Those who do not belong allegedly do not understand 'the reality on the ground.' Scientific criticism, animal welfare arguments and legal objections are dismissed as opinions from outsiders. This is how a system immunizes itself against self-reflection while simultaneously claiming public funds for hunting supervision and wildlife management that in reality primarily serve to protect hunting privileges.

The wolf is coming, the fear remains

The revised Hunting Act, which has been in force since February 1, 2025, has given the cantons more latitude in wolf culling. In the canton of Lucerne, where the wolf has hardly been present so far, this latitude is nevertheless being played politically: calls for 'regulatory competence' come preemptively, before the animals even arrive.

Psychologically, this preemptive alarm reveals much about the understanding of power within hunting circles. The wolf does not primarily threaten livestock, it threatens the hobby hunters' monopoly on 'managing' the forest. An animal that kills roe deer without permits and culling plans is not an enrichment but competition. That a functioning wolf population could make wildlife populations healthier and forests more stable in the long term is not even considered in this logic.

Why recreational hunting fails as population control
Geneva model: Game wardens instead of hobby hunters

Hunting calendar as a system of attrition

The Lucerne hunting calendar 2025/26 encompasses huntable species from red deer and roe deer to wild boar and brown hare to fox, badger, pine and beech marten, squirrel and cormorant. The season extends for various species over practically the entire year. What reads like a factual listing is in reality a license for year-round intervention in the lives of wild animals.

From an animal ethics perspective, the sheer breadth of this list is remarkable. Animal species that are in no ecological crisis situation, that are not socially perceived as pests and for whose hunting there is no scientific justification, stand on equal footing with species for which at least rudimentary regulation arguments exist. The hunting calendar is not a tool of ecology. It is a document of hunting entitlement culture.

Lucerne as a mirror of managed wilderness

The psychology of recreational hunting in the Canton of Lucerne is not a local special case, but an example of how territory hunting, administrative loyalty and hunting milieu form an alliance that immunizes itself against scientific evidence and social criticism. The decline of the lynx, the absent wild boar colonization despite hunting pressure in neighboring cantons and the precautionary alarmism toward the wolf combine to form a picture: Here nature is not being managed, but a privilege is being defended.

Where science, animal ethics and democratic control were taken seriously, this system would have to be fundamentally questioned. Instead, it defends itself with administrative language, territorial thinking and the ever-same claim that without the hobby hunters, nature would collapse. A responsible public sees through these mechanisms and demands wildlife management that does not treat animals as targets of recreational amusement, but as fellow creatures in a shared living space.

Switzerland hunts, but why actually still?
Template texts for hunting-critical initiatives in cantonal parliaments

More on this in the dossier: Psychology of hunting

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