Ticino: Hobby Hunting, the Monopoly on Violence and the Factor-4 Myth

With around 3,000 active hunters in the canton, that corresponds to an attendance rate of 2.7 percent.

An association that claims identity and tradition for itself thus fails to mobilize even one in forty hobby hunters to its general assembly. Nevertheless, on this day the FCTI rhetorically staged a new logo, a new slogan, and an old narrative. Claudio Zali, Director of the Department of the Territory, simultaneously delivered the admission that strips the entire performance bare: hobby hunters are in future to become the «braccio armato dello Stato», the armed arm of the state. This raises precisely three questions that were not answered in Mendrisio, and one that was not even asked.

What Claudio Zali really said in Mendrisio

Zali announced that the planned «Gruppo di supporto» will in future also be allowed to shoot wolves outside the hunting season and with the same means as the game wardens. In this context, he spoke openly of the fact that hobby hunters would thereby once again be «un po‘ il braccio armato dello Stato». He hoped they would take on this burden. And for wolf regulation he announced «nuove regole d’ingaggio», i.e. new rules of engagement. This is not the vocabulary of hobby hunting, this is police and military vocabulary, translated to a leisure activity with a firearm. Anyone speaking this way is not describing a tradition, but an outsourcing.

The 365-day narrative that has no basis in Ticino

Davide Corti tried to contain this finding. He explained that a hobby hunter today is a person who looks after the territory and wildlife «365 days a year», otherwise he could not operate at all within such a restrictive regulatory framework. This statement sounds like stewardship and responsibility. It does not stand up to the simplest legal scrutiny.

The Canton of Ticino has the licence-based hunting system, not the leasehold hunting system. In the licence system there are no private hunting grounds and no leaseholders with stewardship obligations. Hobby hunters acquire an annual licence that permits them to shoot certain species during defined high-season and low-season hunting periods. That is all. A year-round territorial responsibility of all hobby hunters, as Corti suggests, does not exist in Ticino's legal order. The habitat belongs to the canton, the wildlife belongs to no one, and wildlife management outside the hunting season is the responsibility of the state game wardens.

Anyone who nevertheless claims to be responsible for "his" territory and "his" wildlife 365 days a year is either describing an activity unknown to Ticino law, or shifting it into the area that criminal law refers to as poaching. There is no third option. The rhetoric of year-round game management is borrowed from district hunting, where it has its legal anchoring. In Ticino, it is an imported myth meant to embellish the self-description of hobby hunting, without being covered by law or practice.

Corti speaks at the same time of "passione" as the core of the activity and of 365-day responsibility. That is a logical break within a single sentence. Passion belongs to a hobby, year-round responsibility to a profession. Claiming both at once is mislabeling.

Anyone supposedly bearing responsibility for territory and game 365 days a year should at least find their way to the association's annual general meeting once a year to inform and educate themselves. 97.3 percent of Ticino's hobby hunters did not do so. That undermines the self-description of a professional ethos even more clearly than the legal situation alone.

Corti's contradiction in the statistics

In the same speech, Corti provided the figure that blows apart his narrative. When he obtained his hunting license, around 1,600 ungulates per year were shot in Ticino; today it is about 7,000. A fourfold increase within a single generation of hobby hunters. Corti links this to the climate and a changed territory. This explanation withstands no empirical scrutiny and additionally contradicts wildlife biology regarding the very species Corti wants to regulate.

The climate test the hobby hunting lobby does not perform

If climate change were the main driver of Ticino's population trends, hunting-free areas in the same climate zone would have to show the same dynamic. They do not. Three comparable areas have provided empirical counterevidence for more than a hundred years.

In the Swiss National Park, an absolute hunting ban has been in place since 1914. Populations of red deer, chamois and ibex are stable, the forest is regenerating, biodiversity is increasing.

In the Italian Gran Paradiso National Park, hunting has been banned since 1922. The scientific director Bruno Bassano sums up the outcome soberly: there has never been any damage and populations have never had to be reduced.

In the canton of Geneva, the population voted on a hunting ban in a referendum in 1974. Today, around 60 red deer and 200 to 300 roe deer live there in a stable population. The hare reaches one of the highest densities in Switzerland, and overwintering waterfowl have increased tenfold. Wildlife inspector Gottlieb Dandliker describes the result as functioning self-regulation, entirely without hobby hunters.

These three regions have experienced the same milder winters, the same hot summers, and the same vegetation shifts as Ticino. They show no factor of 4. This empirically refutes the climate thesis as the main cause. More on this in the Dossier on the Geneva Model.

Climate change harms mountain ungulates rather than multiplying them

Here the climate argument is additionally dismantled from the wildlife biology side. The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) analyzed a dataset of more than 230,000 kill locations from Graubünden for the years 1991 to 2013 and published the results in the journal “Ecosphere.” The locations where the three most common alpine ungulate species are found have shifted measurably upward in late summer and autumn: by an average of 135 meters for the ibex, 95 meters for the chamois, and 80 meters for the red deer. Study author Kurt Bollmann puts it this way: large warm-blooded animal species also respond to climate change, not only plants, insects, and reptiles. The mean September and October temperature in the study area has risen by 1.3 degrees over twenty years.

This is the exact opposite of what the FCTI suggests. If climate change pushes mountain ungulates into ever higher elevations, it shrinks their habitat. At the top, the mountain ends. Model calculations forecast an average habitat loss of around 35 percent by 2100 for alpine specialist species such as the mountain hare.

For the ibex, an additional biological burden comes into play. It is physiologically adapted to cold, only beginning to feel cold at around minus 20 degrees, and because of its dense winter coat and fat reserves it quickly enters heat stress even at moderate warmth. Wildlife biologists document the response: shorter foraging periods, a shift of activity into the night, weakened immune defenses. The genetic diversity of the Swiss ibex is moreover extremely narrow, because all of today's animals trace back to a founding population of around 100 individuals from the Gran Paradiso.

Heat effects are also evident in chamois. During hot summers, they shorten foraging time in favor of thermoregulation, which costs body mass and reproductive capacity. The Ticino harvest statistics fit this picture: in 2022, 511 chamois were shot, significantly fewer than the 642 of the previous year. One season is not a trend, but the direction is consistent with a population under climatic pressure, not with a climate-driven population explosion.

The FCTI narrative thus turns reality on its head. If climate change were the main driver of Ticino's factor 4, ibex and chamois would have to be increasing particularly strongly. Yet it is precisely these species that show stress signals, shrinking habitats, and adaptive behavior. Anyone invoking climate change as an explanation for the quadrupling of the harvest is ignoring not only the unhunted comparison areas, but also what wildlife biology and the WSL document about the climate sensitivity of the species concerned.

What really explains factor 4

Wildlife biology has known the phenomenon for decades under the term compensatory reproductive dynamics. Hunting interferes with stable social structures and triggers biological counter-reactions. Family groups break up, young females reach sexual maturity earlier, litter sizes increase, and the reproductive inhibition exerted by lead animals disappears. In wild boar, normally only the lead sow reproduces. If she is shot, suddenly all female animals in the sounder reproduce. In foxes, studies from the Bavarian Forest National Park document around 1.7 cubs per litter in unhunted areas, compared with several times that figure in heavily hunted territories.

Applied to Ticino, this means: high hunting pressure dismantles social structures and produces precisely those populations whose reduction hobby hunting then sells as its very reason for existing. The spiral is self-sustaining. The more is shot, the more has to be shot.

What the 6,000 ungulates of 2025 show — and what they do not

In the 2025 season, just under 6,000 ungulates were killed in Ticino, significantly fewer than in the two previous years. The decline particularly affects red deer and wild boar. This one-year fluctuation does not refute the long-term trend. It is consistent with the strain effects of swine fever measures, with local depletion effects, and with weather-related variations in hunting bags. The fourfold increase within a generation remains the relevant benchmark.

When "tradition" is switched off at night

In Mendrisio, Corti cited an old guiding principle of traditional mountain hunting: "The night belongs to the animals." In the same breath, he conceded that nighttime hunting pressure on wild boar had increased because of swine fever. Tradition is thus suspended precisely when a concrete interest is at stake. The same pattern is evident with the wolf. Patience and respect for animals are invoked as long as external perception is concerned. Wherever a predator is perceived as a competitor for red deer and roe deer, the FCTI pragmatically demands expanded killing powers.

The monopoly on the use of force belongs to the state, not to hobby hunting

Here the Ticino initiative leaves the realm of political matters of taste and enters constitutional territory. The state's monopoly on the use of force is anchored in Switzerland implicitly through the rule-of-law principle in Art. 5 of the Federal Constitution and explicitly through Art. 57 of the Federal Constitution as well as the general police clause in Arts. 173 and 185 of the Federal Constitution. It encompasses the competence and duty to have state coercion against persons and property exercised exclusively by state bodies. Constitutional law doctrine is unambiguous on this point.

The killing of a wolf on the basis of a cantonal culling order is a sovereign act. It interferes with the protected status of an animal protected under the Bern Convention and the Hunting Act, and is based on a state decree. Whoever carries out this decree is exercising state authority, not engaging in a private leisure activity.

When a department head publicly hopes that private individuals will take on a state task, he is describing an admission of structural failure, not a model.

The delegation of sovereign tasks to private individuals, legally referred to as enfeoffment, is only permissible under strict conditions according to Art. 178 para. 3 of the Federal Constitution. It requires a formal legal basis, a clearly defined task, official accountability, as well as transparency and oversight. The same standards that have been applied for years in the debate over private security firms apply here all the more, because what is at stake is the state-ordered killing of protected animals with firearms.

Zali's choice of words illustrates the problem: for wolf regulation he announced «nuove regole d'ingaggio», that is, new rules of engagement. This term comes from police and military law. However, hobby hunters have neither police nor military status. They are private individuals with a leisure license. When the state actively entrusts them with killing tasks that it does not want to carry out itself, due to a lack of personnel or political convenience, it undermines the monopoly on the use of force precisely where it should be most visibly upheld: in the application of lethal means on behalf of public authorities.

Zali's openly expressed hope that hobby hunters may “take on” this burden is therefore more than a political detail. It is the request of a cantonal administration to private individuals to do what should actually be the task of the game wardens. The burden referred to here means killing operations. An honest debate would have to raise the question of whether a canton is even authorized to commission hobby hunters for killing operations equivalent to those of game wardens, without creating a formal law with clear democratic legitimacy for that purpose.

The predator gap and what it costs

Central Europe's natural population regulators were exterminated over centuries. Wolf, lynx and bear are returning, but are at the same time being politically held back, especially in Ticino. In the 2024/2025 season, despite four cantonal culling orders and the possibility of killing up to 20 young animals as part of pack regulation, only six wolves were shot. The 22 Ticino game wardens spent around 3,100 paid working hours on this. Taxpayer-funded effort for six dead animals, while the only actor that regulates ungulate populations permanently, selectively and free of charge is being pushed back with ever broader measures. The ecologically effective solution is structurally blocked. More on this in the dossier section.

In Mendrisio, Zali himself admitted that the killings carried out so far by hobby hunters have hardly been successful, because this predator is difficult to find during the day. The consequence is not to question the model. Instead, it is to expand the "rules of engagement," extend the times of day, and align the means. The logic is one-dimensional: if killing does not work, it must be made easier, not reconsidered.

What an honest wildlife policy would require

An honest reform starts on five points.

First, any delegation of sovereign killing operations to hobby hunters requires a formal legal basis with clear democratic legitimacy, not merely a cantonal directive and a training course.

Second, predators must be allowed to take on their ecological role, without every recolonization being stopped by expanded culling orders.

Third, protected areas and wildlife sanctuaries must be expanded, because Geneva, Gran Paradiso, and the Swiss National Park have been proving for decades that self-regulation works.

Fourth, wildlife management belongs in professional state structures with wildlife biology and transparent monitoring, not in the leisure activity of hobby shooters.

Fifth, the language must be detoxified. "Husbandry," "care," "regulation," and "365 days a year" are marketing terms without wildlife-biological or legal substance in the patent system. An honest debate begins with honest terms.

Conclusion

Mendrisio was not a triumph, but a self-dismantling in several acts. 83 out of around 3,000 hobby hunters showed up, the association presented a new logo, Corti claimed 365 days of responsibility in a system that neither recognizes nor permits this responsibility, and Zali openly declared that hobby hunting is to become the armed arm of the state, with new rules of engagement and outside the hunting season.

The factor of 4 is not a climate effect. Patent hunting knows no hunting grounds. The monopoly on the use of force belongs to the state. These three sentences sum up where the Ticino hobby-hunting narrative falls apart. The hunting-free areas of Switzerland and Italy have been proving for over a hundred years that wildlife does not need a hobby hunter with a gun to remain in balance. The Federal Constitution, in turn, leaves no doubt as to who in this country may employ lethal means in the name of the public authority.

Zali's open admission is therefore more than rhetorical imprecision. It is a call to parliament, the public, and the judiciary to take a closer look before the model is sold as a fait accompli from September 2026 onwards, no longer open to negotiation.