Sweden shows where hobby hunting leads: 53 applicants in three hours for a single wolf

In the southern Swedish region of Scania, a wolf had killed a ram and injured a Shetland pony so severely that it had to be put down.

The Länsstyrelse then authorised the “protective hunt” because it suspected the same animal behind both incidents.

The reaction of the Swedish hobby hunters is the real finding: within just three hours, 53 hobby hunters registered their interest in taking part in this protective hunt. This is reported in the magazine “Jakt & Jägare”, the mouthpiece of the hobby hunting association Jägarnas Riksförbund (JRF), and not as a problem but as a success story.

53 applicants for a single animal. That is not damage prevention. Damage prevention requires herd protection, fences, shepherding. What is happening here is the official tendering of a trophy offer. The dead ram merely provides the justification.

The state as a population reducer

The individual case of Scania does not stand alone. On behalf of the Swedish government, the Naturvårdsverket has presented a new national wolf management plan running until 2031. It is aimed primarily at the provincial administrations and is intended to enable a gradual reduction of the wolf population, with the government-mandated target range of 170 to 270 animals and a reference to a “minimum viable population” of 100 individuals.

Read that again: the planning objective is not the protection of a strictly protected species, but its orderly reduction. Dismantling has become an administrative task.

In parallel, the licence hunt on brown bears is under way: 394 bears may be shot this year in the seven northernmost provinces. This too is not an emergency measure, but routine with a quota.

«Animal rights terrorists»: how the dismantling of transparency is re-labelled as victim protection

The most revealing text on jaktojagare.se is the editorial by the JRF president dated 2 July 2026. In it she celebrates that the possibility for «animal rights terrorists» to gain access by invoking the principle of public access, in order to threaten and harass hobby hunters and animal keepers, is finally being stopped.

Translated, this means: kill figures, permits and hunting data are in future to be made harder for the public to access. Anyone who demands them is a «terrorist».

This is the classic figure. Hobby hunting claims to act in the public interest, yet does not want the public to see the figures. Anyone who does the maths is not refuted but criminalised. And this does not appear in some anonymous forum, but in the editorial of the association's organ, signed by the association's president.

An association that frames access to data as terrorism has ceased to be an interest group. It has become a sealing-off machine. Our dossier on the campaigns surrounding hobby hunting shows how influence-peddling and lack of transparency work in this country too, see our dossier on the campaigns surrounding hobby hunting.

The own goal: PFAS in the «healthiest meat in the world»

And then, on the very same home page, comes the report that dismantles the whole self-image. Around Landvetter airport, wild boars and roe deer show excessive PFAS levels. The Länsstyrelse Västra Götaland advises against consuming the meat and liver of these animals from the area between the airport and the Västra Ingsjön. The suspected source is PFAS-containing firefighting foam from the airport fire brigade's exercises.

For years, hobby hunting has sold its product with the argument that game meat is the most natural, cleanest, most ethical meat of all. It lived free, it lived healthy. Now it turns out: it lived in the same contaminated landscape as everything else, only without controls, without threshold monitoring, without traceability. The roe deer from the airport is not an organic product. It is a sample.

The fact that this report appears, of all places, in the hobby hunting magazine itself makes it all the more usable.

And Switzerland? The role model is called Sweden, and quite literally so

Why should we in Bern, Chur or Bellinzona care about this?

Because it is precisely this logic that is currently being imported here, and specifically by a man who expressly cites Sweden as his benchmark.

Councillor of States Fabio Regazzi (Die Mitte/TI), Vice-President of JagdSchweiz, President of the Swiss Trade Association and himself a hobby hunter, is demanding through his motion a fixed upper limit for the wolf population. Once the politically defined figure is reached, «surplus» animals are removed. It is no longer the behaviour of a specific pack that decides, but the statistics.

His reasoning draws directly on Sweden: there, despite a considerably larger surface area, a similar number of wolves live as in Switzerland, and yet Sweden pursues active regulation with the aim of reducing the population to around 170 animals. Watson states it without mincing words: Sweden is «the country Regazzi took as a model».

David Gerke of the Gruppe Wolf Schweiz takes issue precisely with the fact that the initiative is inspired by the Scandinavian model. His objection is as simple as it is devastating: these countries have wolf populations that are not viable, and that is exactly why courts have recently halted wolf hunting there.

That settles the matter. The model Regazzi wants to copy has just been legally halted in its country of origin. The licence hunt of up to 48 wolves planned for January 2026 was blocked by a Swedish administrative court, because the authorities could not prove that species protection was ensured. We have documented this: Sweden halts wolf culls in 2026: a signal to Switzerland.

The Federal Council nonetheless recommends the Regazzi motion for adoption. By Regazzi's own account, this surprised even him.

Whoever orders the Swedish model orders the whole chain:

• Case-by-case assessment becomes a quota.
• The quota becomes a government plan to reduce the population by 2031.
• The government plan becomes a leisure offering with 53 applicants in three hours.
• Anyone who wants to see the figures behind it is a «terrorist».
• And in the end the courts stop the whole thing, because it was unlawful.

You cannot order the upper limit and cancel the degeneration. Regazzi imports the logic, but not the lessons. The pattern has been the same for years: the demand for the kill comes before the analysis.

What follows from this

Sweden is no role model. Sweden is a warning. It shows what happens when wildlife policy is left to the interests of a leisure lobby: the predator becomes an administrative quantity, the wild animal a figure, transparency a security risk and “healthy game meat” an official consumption warning.

With Geneva since 1974 and with the Swiss National Park, Switzerland has its own functioning reference areas without hobby hunting. It does not need to import its model from Scandinavia.

• Fabio Regazzi and the wolf policy of quick fixes in Switzerland
• Politics of quick fixes: how Fabio Regazzi shifts the wildlife debate from a field of evidence to a field of interests
• Dispute over the goosander: Fabio Regazzi demands culls, conservationists warn against quick fixes
• Ticino hunting association FCTI celebrates 30 years of nonsense
• Hobby hunters in Ticino shoot nursing hinds
• National Councillor Fabio Regazzi of the problematic association “Jagd Schweiz”
• Hunting president agitates before the Federal Council
• Ticino hunting president wants to profit at others' expense
• Hunters do not want the ptarmigan protected
• The Ticino wolf agitator
• The wildlife killers
• Ticino: chamois population collapses in popular hiking area
• Success: Jagd Schweiz association loses
• Locarnese National Park will not go ahead
• Hit dogs bark