What is hobby hunting costing us? Grisons only does the maths in one direction
Since 2012 the canton of Grisons has spent over 17 million francs on fences, nets and plastic tubes to protect the forest from cloven-hoofed game. A motion in the cantonal parliament now demands that all follow-up costs be disclosed. What no one wants to disclose: the record of an instrument that has been missing its own target for 37 years.
It is set down in black and white in motion 2026-22, submitted on 23 April 2026 to the Grisons cantonal parliament: as early as 1989 the government resolved to reduce the number of red deer – the most common species of cloven-hoofed game.
Nevertheless, since then it has continued to rise by around 50 per cent.
The sentence does not come from animal welfare campaigners. It comes from Martin Kreiliger, forestry engineer, managing director of the Bergwaldprojekt foundation and SP member of the cantonal parliament from Disentis, backed by 46 further members of the parliament from practically every parliamentary group.
For thirty-seven years hobby hunting was the instrument with which the canton was meant to implement this resolution. The result is the opposite of what was resolved. In any other policy area this would be a case for the audit committee.
Who actually lowers the population
Only since 2021 has the red deer population been declining, and by 17 per cent at that. The motion names the causes verbatim: «The reason is targeted hunting as well as the growing influence of the large predators wolf and lynx.»
With this, an official parliamentary document states what hunting associations have been disputing for years: predators measurably achieve what hobby hunting failed to accomplish over three decades. In its reply of 15 June 2026 the government did not contradict this statement with a single word.
The cost calculation with only one column
Kreiliger demands that the government disclose all future financial consequences of wildlife impact: costs for wildlife damage surveys, for silvicultural and structural replacement measures, for reduced protection forest performance and lower timber yields.
What the motion does not demand: a single figure on hobby hunting itself. Not the administrative expenditure of the Office for Hunting and Fishing. Not the costs of the wildlife wardens. Not the wildlife damage compensation. Not the expenditure on hunting administration. And not the question of what share hunting-related disturbance of wildlife has in browsing damage in protection forests, when animals retreat into young growth areas for cover.
The public purse is to account for what the wildlife costs. What the killing of the wildlife costs remains outside the scope of the calculation.
The subsidy item that no one has quantified for four years
The government's response contains a detail missing from previous reporting. Since 2022, the federal government and the canton have no longer paid 80 per cent for protection forest maintenance, but 90 and in some cases 100 per cent, expressly as a consequence of the «Forest-Wildlife Habitat Strategy 2021».
These additional costs are only to be reported in the short report from 2027 onwards. They have therefore been accumulating for four years without the public or parliament knowing the total. They come on top of the already documented 17 million which, according to the Office for Forests and Natural Hazards, grew by a further 1.6 million francs in 2025 alone, eleven per cent more than the previous year and seventeen per cent above the ten-year average.
When projections are inadmissible, unless they are called something else
The government requests that point 1 of the mandate be referred and point 2 be amended. A single half-sentence is to be deleted: «projections similar to economic forecasting models». Reasoning: such correlations could «not be captured in the required quality».
Two paragraphs earlier, the same government announces that from 2027 it will deliver a «monetisation of the long-term effect of wildlife impact», «based on case studies capturing the additional costs over 50 years in protection forests».
A fifty-year forecast is methodologically a projection. The government rejects the instrument and applies it in the same document. The difference lies in the label, not in the method.
A mandate that has already been referred once
In April 2021, the Grand Council adopted a motion by Josias Gasser with 100 votes in favour, one abstention and no votes against. Even then, it called for the costs caused by wildlife damage to be disclosed.
Five years later, the same thing has to be demanded all over again. A parliamentary motion adopted unanimously was only partially implemented, and parliament has to redouble its efforts to obtain what it had already resolved.
What the August debate should clarify
The Grand Council is expected to deal with the motion in the August 2026 session. Three questions belong on the table that neither the motion nor the government's response raises:
If hobby hunting has missed the target it set itself in 1989 by fifty per cent, why does it remain the guiding instrument of population management? The question is all the more pressing given that it has long been known in wildlife biology that heavily hunted ungulate populations respond with increased reproduction. Anyone who removes a considerable proportion of the population each year relieves pressure on the remaining animals and accelerates their reproduction. Whether the Grisons hunting planning even factors in this effect is not apparent from the published documents.
Secondly: if the wolf and the lynx demonstrably reduce the population, why are they of all things still released for the kill, while the instrument that has been failing since 1989 remains untouched?
Thirdly: why should cost transparency be established that systematically excludes one of the two cost blocks?
Transparency that only calculates in one direction is not transparency. It is accounting with a predetermined outcome.
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