Silent Wolf Extermination: Switzerland Shoots Pups

At the end of July 2025, the canton of Graubünden submitted another application to the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) for a massacre of the wolf population. The goal: from 1 September onwards, to be able to cull up to two thirds of the confirmed young animals in all packs with concrete indications or evidence of current offspring.

Editorial Wild beim Wild — 1 September 2025

During the main and special hunting season hobby hunters support the massacres. Whoever “protects” the wolf in this way is not conducting management, but mass extermination in sheep’s clothing.

Officially, it sounds innocuous: “We need several years of experience and data on wolf regulation in order to obtain meaningful results on its effects,” says hobby hunter Adrian Arquint, head of the Graubünden Office for Hunting and Nonsense, speaking to SRF News on 27.8.2025.

A sentence straight out of the textbook for soothing bureaucratic rhetoric. Yet anyone who looks more closely will recognize it for what it is: nothing more than a diversionary manoeuvre. At the same time, it obscures the fact that there are indeed studies that already demonstrate how culling pups is dangerous for population dynamics.

Because the science has long been clear. International studies have shown for years what happens when pups are shot: the population collapses. The IWJ study (Griesberger et al. 2022) demonstrates that even an increase in pup mortality from 50 to 76% is sufficient to turn population growth negative. And population analyzes warn: at around 40% juvenile mortality and 30% adult mortality, stability is gone.Graubünden and Valais want to kill 66% of the pups — a figure that factors in collapse as a given. Combined with reduced reproduction or additional mortality among females, stray shots, and so forth, local extinction is a very real threat.

Kommunikationsversagen beim Amt für Jagd und Fischerei Graubünden

Nevertheless, Graubünden — together with Valais, Federal Councillor Albert Rösti and the FOEN — is pursuing precisely this strategy. Those responsible know full well what they are doing. That makes it all the worse.

There is therefore no question of “gaining experience.” This is not about learning — it is about imposing. About implementing a policy that, against better knowledge, risks the destruction of a protected species. Or more precisely: factors it in.

The fairy tale of cautious, tentative steps may appeal to the public. In reality, it is a deceptive maneuver. The wolf is not being “regulated” — it is being systematically thinned out, to the point where a stable population can no longer exist. The fact that international obligations such as the Bern Convention or the Biodiversity Strategy are being violated in the process appears to be of secondary concern. The will of the majority of the population is also being disregarded.

In the end, only a bitter conclusion remains: what is being carried out here is not “wildlife management.” It is a creeping re-extermination — disguised as a learning process, sold as caution, but in reality coldly calculated.

Dossier: Wolf Switzerland: Facts, Politics and the Limits of Hunting

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