Solothurn maintains driven hunts

The submitted popular mandate explicitly argued that driven hunts contradict animal welfare: Wildlife is driven by beaters and hunting dogs, forced in front of hunters' guns, thrown into panic without regard for stress, injuries or mortal fear.

The initiators invoke ethical principles and advocate for animal welfare-compliant alternatives. Many wildlife suffer torment through this practice that goes far beyond purely physical death.

Despite these objections, representatives of the established parties justified their decision with familiar technical buzzwords: driven hunts are allegedly 'appropriate' and necessary to regulate deer and wild boar populations and to maintain recreational hunting as an instrument of the ecosystem. However, this argumentation collapses under closer examination. In Canton Geneva recreational hunting has not existed for decades, yet wildlife regulation functions through professional game wardens and state interventions without driven or battue hunts.

Similarly, the federal comparison within Switzerland shows that battue and driven hunts are by no means without alternative. In 16 cantons with patent hunting, wildlife management is organized without territory-based driven hunts, while only 9 cantons maintain territory hunting, in which battue hunts are structurally embedded. The fact that wildlife populations in patent hunting cantons do not collapse and ecological damage does not escalate refutes the political narrative that battue hunts are absolutely necessary. The differences are motivated by hunting politics, not ecologically justified.

The decision of the Solothurn Parliament is therefore not a practical constraint, but a conscious political commitment in favor of a hunting system that systematically accepts stress, flight pressure and animal suffering. The fact that the majority of cantons manage without such hunting forms was largely ignored in the parliamentary debate.

The reference to alleged inevitability is therefore politically convenient, but factually wrong. It serves primarily to protect a hunting practice that is organizationally efficient for recreational hunters, but not animal welfare-compliant for wildlife. The fact that even these counterexamples were hardly addressed in parliament shows how strongly the debate is shaped by hunting interests and how little space scientific, ethical or international comparative perspectives receive.

The government council's statement had already made clear that battue hunts are considered efficient and wildlife-friendly, and that approximately 55 percent of all deer killed in Canton Solothurn come from such hunts. This argumentation is based on hunting efficiency and population target numbers, but not on scientific evaluation of stress, fear or animal welfare.

For animal protection and wildlife protection, this decision is a setback. Critics complain that the debate is too strongly dominated by hunting traditions and too little weight is placed on ethical obligations toward wildlife. Battue hunts generate stress reactions, flight pressure and often injuries beyond quick, clean killing. The common argumentation by authorities that such hunts are 'not pursuit hunts' trivializes the real suffering that animals endure in such situations.

For readers who wish to engage in depth with the political and ethical dimensions of hunting legislation in Canton Solothurn, our article Solothurn government defends animal cruelty is a further resource. There it is shown in detail how hunting decisions continue to ignore animal ethical interests in favor of hunting efficiency despite broad societal criticism.

The decision of the Solothurn Parliament raises fundamental questions about the societal legitimacy of hunting practices: How far may a cantonal parliament go when the majority of the population, represented through a popular mandate, judges a practice as contrary to animal welfare, but political majorities nevertheless maintain it? And how can animal welfare-compliant, scientifically founded concepts for wildlife regulation finally be seriously introduced into the political debate?

Dossier: Hunting and Animal Protection