Thurgau: Eighth roe deer poaching case in 17 months

Since January 2025, the Thurgau cantonal police have reported the eighth case of roe deer poaching, most recently an animal that died from its injuries in Erlen after having been shot «unprofessionally and unlawfully» hours earlier.

Wild beim Wild editorial team — 19 May 2026

On 5 May 2026, a dead roe deer was found in the garden of a property on Hauptstrasse in Erlen.

Subsequent investigations by the cantonal police revealed that the animal had been shot several hours earlier at an unknown location, had then fled while injured and finally died. According to the authorities, the offence violates three laws at once: the Federal Act on Hunting and the Protection of Wild Mammals and Birds, the Weapons Act and the Animal Welfare Act, specifically the offence of cruelty to animals.

Eight cases in seventeen months

Since January 2025, this is already the eighth documented case of poaching involving roe deer in the canton of Thurgau. Statistically, this frequency can no longer be classified as coincidence; it corresponds to roughly one detected case every two months, while experts estimate that the number of unreported cases is considerably higher. In the same canton, a total of 2,333 roe deer were killed by recreational hunters during the regular hobby hunt in the 2024 hunting year. Roe deer poaching therefore does not take place in a vacuum, but in an environment in which the shooting of roe deer has been administratively and socially normalised.

The word “unprofessional” and its meaning

In its statement, the cantonal police chose the wording that the animal had been shot “unprofessionally”. This describes not only an unlawful act, but also explicitly a deficient level of craftsmanship. This finding matches the assessment of IG Wild beim Wild, which concluded in a study that recreational hunters are among the worst compared to other groups of marksmen. The fact that an animal flees injured after being hit and dies in agony hours later is not a rare exception, but a documented structural problem in recreational hunting.

Who are the poachers? The myth of the outsider

In public perception, poaching is often associated with nocturnal outsiders. The documented evidence in Switzerland paints a different picture. In Prättigau, the Grisons cantonal police solved ten cases in 2021 in which a local recreational hunter had regularly killed chamois and roe bucks, as well as protected crowned stags, outside the hunting season since 2014. In the canton of Jura, four recreational hunters, including an assistant game warden, poached a total of 138 roe deer, 36 hares, 12 wild boars and 11 chamois between 2002 and 2006. In reality, the boundaries between licensed recreational hunting and poaching are fluid.

Structural oversight problem in the territorial hunting system

The canton of Thurgau is one of the territorial hunting cantons in which the municipalities lease hunting rights to hunting associations. Oversight of recreational hunting in this system is structurally biased. In most cantons it is the hunting administrations themselves — authorities institutionally intertwined with the recreational hunting community — that are tasked with penalising violations. The wildlife wardens, who carry out checks in the field, are markedly understaffed. In many cantons, only a handful of game wardens are responsible for hundreds of recreational hunters.

The Geneva model as a counter-proposal

In the canton of Geneva, recreational hunting was abolished by popular vote on 19 May 1974. Since then, professional game wardens have taken on the regulatory tasks that elsewhere are delegated to recreational hunters. The immediate-kill rate of professional shooting, at around 99.5 per cent, is significantly higher than that of recreational hunting. Under such a model, the issue of roe deer poaching would also be structurally framed differently: where there is no private recreational hunting with leases, quotas and pressure to fill kill tallies, the main motives and opportunities for poaching from within the recreational hunting community are absent.

Tips to the 117 emergency number

The Thurgau cantonal police are asking the public to report suspicious observations as well as finds of killed or injured wild animals via the 117 emergency number. Every observation can be a piece of the puzzle towards solving the case — a resolution that fails in many other Swiss poaching cases due to structural weaknesses.

More on this topic at wildbeimwild.com: Crime and recreational hunting · Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland · Geneva model: Swiss canton without recreational hunting · Ticino recreational hunter convicted as poacher · Statistics on fatal hunting accidents

More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.

The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.