Public Dumbing-Down in the Canton of Lucerne

It has always been a great concern of Wild beim Wild to support the hunting community in its public relations work.

Editorial Wild beim Wild — 23 June 2025

Recently, 31 participants – 29 men and 2 women – of the hunting course in Altishofen were able to receive their hunting competency certificates.

13 persons did not pass the hunting training this year, representing a share of 29%. This was confirmed by Christian Hüsler, Head of the Hunting and Wildlife Warden Division at the cantonal Department of Agriculture and Forestry (Lawa).

The high failure rate particularly affects the oral examination in the Weapons module, where an above-average number of participants did not pass the examination.

The graduates receive a hunting competency certificate, which entitles them to a hunting licence or hunting permit in most Swiss cantons. In addition, the hunting territories in the canton of Lucerne are leased every eight years, with 122 leased territories in existence. The number of new participants in hunting training has declined compared to previous years.

At the same time, media in Switzerland are once again reporting how useless hunting training is. It serves and protects absolutely nothing. Recreational hunting is not a scientific, wildlife-biologically sound, or professional wildlife management practice. It opens the door to criminal activities for hobby hunters.

There are no associations with legal status whose members are so deeply rooted in criminality as in hunting. Modern hunting is characterised by a inferior ethical awareness and a high degree of irresponsibility.

Today's recreational hunting destroys the normal social coexistence of wildlife, the ecological balance, natural behaviors, family structures and social groups, use of dens and hiding places, shifts from diurnal to nocturnal activity, increased reproduction of certain animal species, increased migration into unhunted residential areas, unnatural concentrations of animals in hotspots, ecological imbalance, lifelong health-damaging psychological and physical stress of wildlife, unhealthy game meat, and much more that is harmful. Hunting training imparts conclusions that would not withstand scientific scrutiny.

Facts instead of hunters' tales

More and more city dwellers are leaving their offices to go out into the open countryside – not only for recreation, but also for nature conservation. If more meaningful opportunities for slowing down were offered here, they would not have to end up in hunting, sliding into mediocrity and becoming intellectually dulled.

An ordinary person does not want to have to obtain a firearms license in order to enhance biotopes or to care for and tend to wildlife with dignity, respect, and honor. Hobby hunters rescue roe deer fawns in spring so they can take their shot at them in autumn.

The cheerful back-patting among hobby hunters looks like this today, for example in the case of foxes:

Although every normal wildlife biologist knows (and countless studies and case examples point to the fact) that the senseless fox hunt is also a fabricated fairy tale – hunters' lore, in fact.

In the place of the fox, any wildlife animal can be laid out like this, after being cared for and tended to by hobby hunters.

Hobby hunters also deliberately cause serious disruptions to the natural balance of species through small game hunting, in order to be able to hunt more successfully.

Hobby hunters spread unspeakable suffering, terror, and misery among both humans and wildlife. Practically everything that is cruel, unnecessary, and heartless is promoted by hunting associations, as a court in Bellinzona recently confirmed. Because of hobby hunters, wildlife suffers. It is not uncommon for hobby hunters to also direct their weapons at people .

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

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

Vermin must be killed
Wildlife are fruit that merely wait to be harvested
Ecology means: poisoning the soil, groundwater and wildlife with ammunition
making as much noise as possible in the forest
Fur is fashion
Meat consumption is healthy and innate to humans
Hunting and animal cruelty are animal protection
Alcohol and other drugs are part of the fun at the rifle
Hunters’ tall tales are science
Hunting is a deep form of meditation
Killing is a commandment of Moses
Hobby hunters are the advocates for wildlife
etc.

Time and again, claims emerge from the hobby hunter milieu that, upon closer analysis, have their origins in hunting literature and similarly unscientific sources. This is due above all to the frequently inadequate training in courses for the hunting examination, which are predominantly conducted by partly fanatical individuals with cult-like ideology who require no regular proof of qualification. After completing their training, hobby hunters move exclusively within the echo chamber of the hunting press, which continually repeats their skewed and often false representations.

Within hunting associations, members then mutually reinforce one another’s worldview. In this way, a closed-off and militant grouping has emerged that is barely receptive to new information. The fatal aspect of this 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 sphere.

Hobby hunters are harmed by civil servants

At the point where violence is discharged, damage is caused just as much as at the point to which it is directed — and this quite concretely at the neuronal level. Scientists have established this through research. Neuropsychologists also confirm: the amygdala, a core region of the brain, is markedly 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.

Anyone who obtains a hunting license thus always receives two things at once: a license to kill and a license to become stupefied.

„Fair chase" also has nothing to do with animal welfare. The code of hunting ethics followed by hobby hunters is diametrically opposed to the Animal Welfare Act. ‘Fair chase’ hunting ethics are about as far removed from animal welfare legislation 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 progressed far enough to reflect this in criminal law.

More and more people feel disturbed or threatened by hobby hunting in the 21st century.

That is why we commend the Canton of Geneva with its professional wildlife management without hobby hunters, but with competent wildlife wardens. On the shores of Lake Geneva there are vineyards and other cultivated areas, just as in the rest of Switzerland. Evidently, however, they take a humane and ethical approach to dealing with wildlife there, along with intelligent measures to protect crops. Wildlife wardens do not organise driven hunts, nor do they require hunting dogs for this purpose. In Geneva, foxes, martens, badgers, birds, and so on are not ‘regulated’ simply because hunting season has arrived. This is also reflected in the federal hunting statistics. Instead, practical deterrence measures and meaningful public education, assistance, and training are carried out together with wildlife wardens. Safety, expertise, animal welfare, and ethics are the guiding principles. Sanitary and therapeutic culls by wildlife wardens, as practised in the Canton of Geneva, are not the same as regulatory hunting based on hunters’ jargon or a misguided understanding of nature.

Particularly with regard to hunting and hobby hunters, it is essential that the public scrutinises matters very closely. Nowhere is manipulation through falsehoods and fake news more prevalent. 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 organisations, the police, the federal government, the media, and so on.

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