Trophy Show Thun: A Macabre Gathering of Hobby Hunters

On 11 February 2017, the Bernese Trophy Exhibition Fur and Pelt Market in Thun took place for the 83rd time.

Editorial Team Wild beim Wild — 12 February 2017

The event is mostly a pure hobby hunter gathering, an occasion to revel in the victims of past years.

Just as bushmen in tropical rainforests still enjoy displaying their shrunken heads, Bernese hobby hunters also take pleasure in drawing negative public attention with their trophy cult.

The ordinary residents of Thun largely give the foul-smelling event a wide berth, according to committee president Fred Boner, who will not be returning in that role next year. He found the criticism of the fur market increasingly wearing in recent times. It remains unclear whether the hobby hunters’ exhibition will take place at all in future, or indeed at the same location.

Protest Against Hobby Hunting

For the third consecutive time, around 100 activists occupied Waisenhausplatz in Thun to express their opposition to hobby hunting and fur production. Protesters chanted loudly and peacefully for the abolition of hunting. Among many other animal species, the fox in particular suffers greatly under compulsory hunting. Foxes are regarded in hunting circles as predatory competitors of so-called «vermin». Yet foxes play a particularly important role in maintaining ecological balance. According to science, hunting-based regulation of healthy fox populations is entirely unnecessary and counterproductive.

The hobby hunters' hatred of foxes stems primarily from the fact that these predators compete with hobby hunters for the same prey. The fact that ecosystems and food chains form a complex web of mutual interdependence — which, if left alone, independently maintains biodiversity and population sizes — is consistently ignored. Predators also secure the survival of their prey species by targeting weak and sick animals first (as these are easiest to catch), thereby immediately eliminating sources of disease.

Hobby hunters do not fulfil this function. They cannot, like a fox pursuing a hare, etc., follow an animal briefly to determine whether it is ailing. Besides, it is not even the hobby hunter's intention to do anything comparable: their interest lies rather in magnificent trophies, meat, pelts, and the bloody, cruel, and inhumane thrill of the hunt. The Hobby hunting fails as population control.

Hobby hunting does not regulate the fox population. Hunting is, rather, an unnecessary disruptive factor that leads to increased mortality, which is nonetheless absorbed and compensated for through reproduction. Even under current environmental conditions in our Central European cultivated landscape, hunting the red fox is neither necessary nor sensible, and judging by the results of its decades of unsuccessful practice, it is quite obviously not a suitable means of solving problems.

People wear clothes, animals wear fur

If people knew of the horror these animals endure in order to provide a hairy strip of skin soaked in chemicals to preserve it from decay, it would make their throats tighten.

«For animals, life on this earth is hell, and their devils are humans. The outrageous wickedness with which the Christian rabble treats animals, killing them laughingly, mutilating or tormenting them.» Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
«The goal of hunters is to keep the number of their victims consistently high. The environment would maintain itself optimally through an internal regulatory mechanism, without humans shooting. I truly see no other function for hunting than that it is a pleasure. Hunting serves only the hunters.» Bruno Bassano (Gran Paradiso National Park, Italy)
«Of all ways of life, the hunting life is without doubt the most contrary to a civilized constitution; the Noachian prohibition on blood seems originally to have been nothing other than a prohibition on the life of the hunter.» Immanuel Kant, German philosopher
«We do not have two hearts — one for animals and one for humans. In the exercise of violence against the former and the exercise of violence against the latter, there is no difference other than that of the victim.» Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), French poet and politician
«He who torments animals is without soul, and lacks God’s good spirit. However noble he may appear, one should never place trust in him.» Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet
«Those people who take pleasure in killing, who believe they gain prestige through a trophy of flesh, have attained neither the moral nor the intellectual maturity to recognize the primitiveness of their actions.» Saper, neurologist/neurosurgeon
«No, we hunt because it gives us pleasure, and what we call wildlife management is nothing but naked self-interest, occasionally envy over spoils. We do not want to catch the hawk because we feel sorry for the poor pheasants, because we wish them eternal life. We want the hawk, the weasel, the fox and company only for ourselves, because we want to take and devour their quarry ourselves.» Bruno Hespeler, specialist journalist including for the magazine «JÄGER», professional hunter

Even though people who hunt may have different character traits, all hobby hunters are ultimately united by the same behavior: a violent way of dealing with peaceful animals — often purely for fun, leisure, or sport.Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts speak, in the context of hunting, of psychological disorders among hobby hunters as a means of compensating for something.

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