Hunting in decline, hunting licences at a record: Germany's special case under the fact check

Italy, Spain, Portugal and the USA have for years reported declining hunting participation or a sharply shrinking number of new entrants.

According to an analysis by the Lega Abolizione Caccia, the number of Italian hunting permits valid for the hunting season fell by 2.7 percent compared with the previous year. This figure captures issued or renewed hunting authorisations; it is therefore closer to actual hunting participation than a lifelong weapons or examination authorisation, though it does not necessarily document every single day of hunting. More on this in the article Italy: Fewer than 430,000 active hobby hunters. Germany, by contrast, reports more hunting licence holders than ever before. This is not necessarily a contradiction: hunting licence, permit and examination figures do not automatically measure how many people actually go hobby hunting on a regular basis.

Three questions arise: Is the decline part of a broader social pattern? Why does hobby hunting depend so heavily on being passed down within families? And what does the German record actually show?

A cross-sector problem of new entrants

The decline in hobby hunting does not stand alone. In the Swiss meat trade, according to SRF, about every second apprenticeship position has remained unfilled in recent years. At the end of March 2025, 195 apprenticeship positions with a start date in August were still open. This does not automatically imply the same cause as with hobby hunting. The parallel does, however, at least raise the question of whether activities involving the killing, butchering and marketing of animals are losing social acceptance among a portion of young people.

Family tradition as the main point of entry

An Austrian survey published in 2011 among around 500 active hobby hunters (documented under the title «Zukunftsjäger 2030» on jagdfibel.de) suggests that hunting is passed on to many people primarily through the family: 58 percent cited a hunting tradition within the family, while networking reasons and interest in weapons were mentioned considerably less often. The survey is not proof for all countries, but it does point to a structural dependence of hobby hunting on social and family transmission. Unlike an open vocational apprenticeship with an apprenticeship market, there is hardly a second channel that could replace a breakdown in family transmission.

The 2022 annual presentation of the Grisons Office for Hunting and Fishing identifies the baby-boom cohorts of 1956 to 1968 as the most strongly represented age groups among hunters in Grisons. This is consistent with the findings of a 2025 study published in the journal «People and Nature» on hunters in Spain and Portugal (Gaspar et al.), which documents a decline of 26 percent over 15 years and 45 percent over 50 years in the regions studied. The recruitment of young hobby hunters fell by 89 percent over five decades, and participation among the youngest age group dropped from 1.70 to 0.22 percent. The researchers speak of a demographic collapse of hunting in the region studied.

A shift in awareness among young people?

At the same time, the diets of young people are changing measurably. The Swissveg Report 2024, based on a representative survey (DemoScope/MACH Consumer), shows that 8.4 percent of 14- to 34-year-olds in Switzerland describe themselves as vegetarian, compared with 2.1 percent among those over 55. In total, around 308,000 people living vegetarian and 50,000 living vegan were recorded in 2024, together 5.3 percent of the population, more than ever before. Whether it can be directly concluded that young people therefore less often enter a family hunting tradition is a plausible but, on the basis of the dietary data alone, unproven hypothesis.

Spain, Portugal and the USA in detail

In the USA too, hunting participation as a share of the population has been shrinking in the long term, with two different metrics painting the same picture. In terms of hunting licences sold, around 14 million were counted in 1960, about 7.7 percent of the population at the time. For 2020, around 15.2 million hunting licences are reported, equivalent to 4.6 percent of the population. The absolute figure thus changed far less than the population, which grew strongly over the same period. The report «Recruitment and Retention of Hunters and Anglers» by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service additionally measures actual adult hunting participation through surveys: it fell from 8.9 percent in 1960 to 4.5 percent in 2016, the lowest figure in the survey series to date.

The German case: a record, but of what?

According to the German Hunting Association (DJV), based on data from November 2025, there were a total of 467,682 hunting licence holders, an increase of 42 percent compared with 30 years earlier. The statistics of the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture also report a practically identical figure of around 467,680 hunting licence holders for 2025. According to the DJV, the proportion of women among newly qualified hunters rose from 20 to 28 percent between 2011 and 2021.

This record figure primarily demonstrates that more people than ever hold or have obtained a hunting licence. However, it does not answer the further question of how many of them actually hunt regularly, have their own hunting ground, only join hunts as guests, or merely keep their licence active. A publicly available comprehensive German survey that systematically distinguishes the number of hunting licence holders from the number of people who actually hunt regularly could not be identified for this comparison. Without such a survey, the hunting licence figures alone cannot serve as direct counter-evidence to the decline in hunting participation observed in other countries.

The motives for taking a hunting examination are not necessarily identical to the motive of later hunting regularly oneself. In a DJV survey, 62 percent of the women hunters surveyed cited occupying their own hunting dog as the most important motive for taking the hunting examination. This does not indicate how often these women actually hunt, but the survey does show that passing the hunting examination and actively hunting are not always identical categories. An observation from a personal acquaintance anecdotally confirms this impression: a woman hunter reported that she had completed the training to learn more about nature, but that she herself would not go on the actual hunt.

Conclusion

The available data do not paint a uniform picture, but they do reveal a clear pattern: in Italy, Spain, Portugal and the USA, hunting participation or the number of new entrants is declining in the long term. In Spain and Portugal, the ageing of the hunting population is particularly well documented. Germany, meanwhile, reports a record number of hunting licence holders.

This record, however, is not direct evidence of a growing active hunting community. It shows how many people hold or obtain a hunting licence, but not how often they actually hunt. As long as Germany does not publish a comparable survey on regular hunting activity, it remains unclear whether the rise in hunting licences reflects an actual increase in active hunters, or whether it also includes people who use their licence only occasionally, out of interest in training, dogs, or nature.

This also applies to Switzerland: anyone wishing to assess the future of hobby hunting should distinguish between examination, hunting licence, hunting authorisation and actual hunting activity. More on the social context of hobby hunting can be found in the article The hobby hunter in the 21st century as well as in the dossier on studies concerning the effects of hunting. The underlying Italian figures are broken down in detail in the article Italy: Fewer than 430,000 active hobby hunters.