Public Stupefaction in the Canton of Aargau

At Habsbourg Castle 58 new hobby hunters were permitted to receive their certificates of competence as successful graduates of the hunting examination.

The theoretical part was difficult, according to Urs Wunderlin, the president of the hunting examination commission. 70 people had sat the exam, 58 passed. “The level of performance was high,” Wunderlin told the graduates of the hunting course. “You are the new faces of hunting,” Wunderlin added. The new hobby hunters are encouraged to get involved in their communities and “give the image of the hunter a new face.”

“No Walk in the Park”

“Hunting training is no walk in the park,” cantonal councillor Stephan Attiger also emphasised. “It requires a great deal of time, diligence and nerves.” Hunting is a lifelong learning process, he noted. Hunting itself is also changing. He described contact with the public as an important mandate of hunting, as well as demonstrating what hunting contributes.

Facts Instead of Hunters’ Tales

More and more city dwellers are leaving their offices for the great outdoors — not only for recreation, but also for nature conservation. If more meaningful offerings for slowing down were provided here, they would not need to end up in hunting, decline and grow intellectually dull.

An ordinary person does not want to have to obtain a firearms licence first in order to enhance biotopes or wildlife with decency, respect and dignity. Hobby hunters rescue roe deer fawns in spring, only to take aim at them come autumn.

The cheerful back-slapping among hobby hunters looks like this today, for example with foxes: although every normal wildlife biologist knows (and countless studies and case examples point to this) that the senseless fox hunting is also a fabricated fairy tale — hunter's yarn, plain and simple.

In the place of the fox, one can substitute any wild animal and lay it out in the same way, after the care and stewardship with this militant hobby hunter.

Yes, hobby hunters spread unspeakable suffering, terror and misery both among people and among wild animals. Practically everything that is cruel, unnecessary and heartless is promoted by hunting associations, as a court in Bellinzona recently confirmed. Wild animals suffer because of hobby hunters. Not infrequently, hobby hunters also direct their weapons at people.

According to studies, hobby hunters even promote and spread diseases.

• Hobby hunters spread diseases
• Hobby hunting promotes diseases

Hobby hunters struggle when they have to explain themselves in an enlightened society. They are insufficiently, or not at all, educated. And so most hunting licence holders waddle through nature with the following attitudes:

• Predatory vermin must be shot
• Wild animals are fruit just waiting to be harvested
• Ecology means: poisoning the soil, groundwater and wild animals with ammunition
• making as much noise as possible in the forest
• Fur is fashion
• Meat consumption is healthy and innate to humans
• Hobby hunting and animal cruelty are animal protection
• Alcohol and other drugs are part of the fun with a rifle
• Hunter's yarn is science
• Hobby hunting is deep meditation
• Killing is a commandment of Moses
• Hobby hunters are the advocates for wild animals
• etc.

Hobby hunters are harmed by officials

At the point where violence is discharged, damage is caused just as much as at the point at which it is directed. And this is conceivably concrete at the neuronal level. Scientists have discovered this through studies of soldiers and serial killers. Neuropsychologists also confirm: the amygdala, a core region of the brain, is noticeably underdeveloped or impaired in perpetrators of violence. When this central part of the brain is defective, the sense of disgust, among other things, is switched off.

Whoever obtains a hunting licence therefore always receives two things: a licence to kill and a licence to become stupid.

«"Waidgerecht" also has nothing to do with animal protection to do. The fair chase ethics of hobby hunters are diametrically opposed to the Animal Protection Act. Fair chase ethics are about as far removed from the Animal Protection Act as a cow is from riding a bicycle. Today's hobby hunting is, at its core, simply criminal. It is just that our legal system has not yet advanced to the point of addressing this in criminal law.

We commend the Canton of Geneva for its professional wildlife management without hobby hunters, but with dedicated game wardens. On Lake Geneva there are vineyards and other cultivated areas, as in the rest of Switzerland. Evidently, however, they employ humane and ethical approaches in dealing with wildlife and intelligent measures to protect crops. Game wardens do not organize driven hunts nor do they require hunting dogs for this purpose. In Geneva, foxes, martens, badgers, birds, etc. are not culled simply because it is hunting season. This is also reflected in the federal hunting statistics. Instead, practical deterrent measures and meaningful education, assistance, and further training take place among the population together with the game wardens. Safety, expertise, animal welfare, and ethics are the guiding principles.

Time and again, claims are made from within hobby hunter circles that, upon closer analysis, have their origins in hunting literature and similarly unscientific sources. This is due primarily to the frequently inadequate training in courses for the hunting examination, which are largely conducted by individuals with cult-like ideologies who require no formal proof of qualification. After completing their training, hobby hunters operate exclusively within the echo chamber of the hunting press, which continually repeats their distorted and often false representations.

Within hunting clubs, members then mutually reinforce one another's worldview. In this way, an insular and militant group has emerged that is barely receptive to new information. What makes this particularly damaging is that the local press and politicians still believe that expertise resides beneath the hunter's hat, which is why they readily consult the local hobby hunter on all matters relating to nature. In this way, hobby hunters also contaminate the public discourse.

Particularly when it comes to hobby hunting and hobby hunters, it is essential that the public pays very close attention. Nowhere else is there so much manipulation through falsehoods and fake news. Violence and lies are two sides of the same coin. For decades, hobby hunting has been nothing other than a permanently costly construction site, patchwork, and point of contention for politics, forestry and agriculture, administrations, the judiciary, health insurers, insurance companies,animal welfare-, environmental and nature conservation organizations, police, federal authorities, the media, etc.