Public Dumbing-Down in the Canton of St. Gallen

It has always been a great concern of IG Wild beim Wild to support the hunting community in its public relations work.

Editorial team Wild beim Wild — 18 June 2025

On 13 June 2025, this year's hunting examinations in St. Gallen were completed.

A total of 36 hobby hunters passed the examinations and may now receive their certificate of competence. Thus, 73 % of the candidates who sat the examinations successfully completed their hunting training.

At the same time, media outlets are again reporting on how useless hunting training is. It serves and protects absolutely nothing. Hobby hunting is neither a scientific, wildlife-biologically sound, nor professional form of wildlife management.

Jagdszene im Kanton St. Gallen: Verurteilung wegen illegaler Dachsbejagung

There are no associations with legal status whose members are so deeply entrenched in criminality as in hunting. Modern hunting is characterised by a deficient ethical awareness and a high degree of irresponsibility.

Today's hobby hunting destroys the normal social coexistence of wildlife, the ecological balance, natural behavioral patterns, family structures and social bonds, the use of dens and hiding places, the shift from diurnal to nocturnal activity, increased reproduction of certain animal species, intensified migration into unhunted residential areas, unnatural concentrations of animals in hotspots, ecological imbalance, lifelong health-damaging psychological and physical stress on wildlife, unhealthy game meat, and much more that is harmful.

Facts instead of hunters' tales

More and more city dwellers are leaving their offices to venture into the open countryside — not only for recreation, but also for nature conservation. If more meaningful opportunities for slowing down were offered here, they would not have to end up in hunting, sliding into it and being intellectually diminished by it.

A normal person does not want to have to obtain a firearms licence first in order to enhance biotopes or to tend to and care for wildlife with dignity, respect, and honour. Hobby hunters rescue roe deer fawns in spring so that they can deliver the killing shot to them in autumn.

The cheerful back-slapping among hobby hunters looks like this today, for example with foxes: although every normal wildlife biologist knows (and countless studies and case examples point to the fact) that the senseless fox hunting is also a fabricated myth — hunters’ tall tales, in other words.

St.Gallen: Stoppt das Fuchs- und Dachsmassaker

In place of the fox, one can substitute any wild animal and examine what becomes of it after care and management by militant hobby hunters.

Hobby hunters also deliberately cause serious disruptions to the natural balance of species through small game hunting, in order to hunt more successfully.

Hobby hunters spread unspeakable suffering, terror and misery among both people and wildlife. Virtually everything that is cruel, unnecessary and heartless is promoted by hunting associations, as a court in Bellinzona has recently confirmed in a ruling . Due to hobby hunters, wild animals suffer. It is not uncommon for hobby hunters to also direct their weapons at people .

According to studies, hobby hunters even promote and spread diseases.

Hobby hunters struggle when they have to explain themselves in an enlightened society. They are insufficiently, or not at all, educated. And so most hunting licence holders waddle through nature with the following attitude:

Vermin must be shot
Wild animals are fruit just waiting to be harvested
Ecology means: poisoning the soil, groundwater and wildlife with ammunition
making as much noise as possible in the forest
Fur is fashion
Meat consumption is healthy and innate to humans
Hunting and animal cruelty are animal protection
Alcohol and other drugs are part of the fun with the rifle
Hunters’ tall tales are science
Hunting is a deep form of meditation
Killing is a commandment of Moses
Hobby hunters are the advocates for wild animals
etc.

Time and again, claims are made from within the hobby hunter milieu that, upon close analysis, have their origins in hunting literature and similarly unscientific sources. This is due above all to the frequently inadequate training in courses for the hunting examination, which are largely conducted by individuals, some of them fanatics, with cult-like ideologies and require no regular proof of qualification. After their training, the hobby hunter moves exclusively within the echo chamber of the hunting press, which continually repeats his skewed and often false representations.

In hunting clubs, members mutually reinforce their own worldview. In this way, an insular and militant group has emerged that is barely receptive to new information. The fatal consequence is that the local press and politicians still believe that expertise resides beneath the hunter's hat, which is why they readily consult the local hobby hunter on all matters relating to nature. In this way, hobby hunters also contaminate the public discourse.

Hobby hunters are harmed by officials

At the point where violence is discharged, damage is caused just as much as at the point toward which it is directed — and this quite concretely at the neuronal level. Scientists have discovered this through research. Neuropsychologists also confirm: the amygdala, a core region of the brain, is markedly underdeveloped or impaired in perpetrators of violence. When this central part of the brain is defective, the sense of disgust, among other things, is switched off.

Anyone who obtains a hunting licence therefore always receives two things: a licence to kill and a licence to become dull-witted.

„"Fair chase"" also has nothing to do with animal welfare. The hobby hunters' concept of fair chase is diametrically opposed to animal welfare legislation. Fair chase is about as far removed from animal welfare law as a cow is from riding a bicycle. Today's hobby hunting is, at its core, simply criminal. It is just that our legal system has not yet advanced far enough to reflect this in criminal law.

More and more people feel harassed or threatened by hobby hunting in the 21st century.

We have nothing but praise for the Canton of Geneva with its professional wildlife management without hobby hunters, but with upstanding game wardens. On the shores of Lake Geneva there are vineyards and other cultivated areas, as elsewhere in Switzerland. Evidently, however, humane and ethical approaches to dealing with wildlife and intelligent measures to protect crops are applied there. Game wardens do not organise driven hunts nor do they require hunting dogs for this purpose. In Geneva, foxes, martens, badgers, birds, etc. are not culled simply because it is hunting season. This is also reflected in the federal hunting statistics. Instead, practical deterrence measures and sensible public education, assistance, and continuing training are carried out in cooperation with wildlife wardens. Safety, expertise, animal welfare, and ethics are the guiding principles. Sanitary and therapeutic culls by wildlife wardens, as practiced in the canton of Geneva, are not the same as regulatory hunting based on hunters' lore or a misguided understanding of nature.

When it comes to hunting and hobby hunters in particular, it is essential that the public scrutinizes matters very carefully. Nowhere else is so much manipulation carried out through falsehoods and fake news. Violence and lies are two sides of the same coin. For decades, recreational hunting has been nothing other than a permanently costly construction site, a patchwork, and a point of contention for politics, forestry and agriculture, public administrations, the judiciary, health insurers, insurance companies, animal welfare, environmental and nature conservation organizations, the police, the federal government, the media, and so on.

Dossier: Hunting Administration of St. Gallen: