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Anyone who hikes through the Spessart runs into such things as left-over root vegetables, corn and salt. Many an animal friend’s heart warms over such care of the wild animals – until he turns and discovers a high shooting blind just a few meters away from where the food is lying directly in its line of fire. What he sees before him is the bait with which the wild pigs are lured into “execution by shot.” The feed is laid out like a last meal. The executioner carries out the death sentence from his comfortable high seat. He thinks of his action as a “hunting sport” that he practices as a recreational activity.

This is how sad it is: Basically, for the animals it is even a lucky thing if they are executed in this way, because they may die immediately. .

Daily thousands of wounded Severely injured animals

 

Often – estimated at 50% of all cases – they are only “shot ill,” as it is expressed among expert hunters. The hit deer, whose entrails are totally ripped apart, or the wild boar, whose jaws were shattered, drags itself, badly wounded, into the bushes where its young are waiting and have to witness the pitifully horrible death of its doe mother or its sow mother. After a few hours, the assassins begin their search, in order to stab the deer, or give the coup de grâce to the sow or to kill off the hare, and at that, by beating it with a cudgel or the butt of their rifle.

Such scenes play themselves out by the thousands daily. In their hunting magazines, the culprits rave about such “hunting experiences,” for example, the leading magazine on hunting called “Wild Game and Hounds” where the following could be read: “The late Fall sun slowly began to tire out and dark clouds covered the sky again. Finally the old lady (a doe) changed her mind and moved out onto the flat open field with her young. I waited until both fawns were within my line of fire. Before the second piece (one of the fawns) had understood that the one closest in line had been knocked over by a shot, it, too, received a bullet.”

The hunter then describes how the shocked doe mother looked at both dead fawns and then took flight in horror. But the executioner remains calm because he knows that the doe, as he writes, “follows her mother’s instincts, and sooner or later will examine the remains of her fawns.” Unfortunately, that is what happened. She came back. The hunter shot at her, but hit her too far back: “With staggering jumps, she sprang right in the direction of her fawns and collapsed directly before them ..."

the cruel killing of foxes: A "Passion"

 

Foxes are exposed to very special cruelties. They are considered competition to the hunters because hares are also a part of their prey – normally, these are the sick animals, which is why ecologists consider foxes a guarantee for a healthier hare population. But for the hunters, he is a predator that they bag particularly mercilessly and with greater joy.

One can read in the German hunting magazine that fox hunting is “particularly exciting,” which “a passionate hunter cannot pass up.” This “passion” also includes trapping, which often causes an endless death fight for the animals caught in it. Bleeding and in painful agony, they often lie for hours in the traps that snapped shut on them. Their young then wait in vain for their provider who’s fighting for its life; or in the end, even bites off its own paw to free itself from the trap and return to its family as an amputee. “Foxes are exemplary parents and faithful marriage partners.” (Dag Frommhold)

Every year in germany 5 million animals living in the wild are slaughtered

 

Alone in Germany, in forests and fields, a total of 5 million animals are killed by around 300,000 hunters, for whom killing is a nerve-tingling recreational pleasure and social event. They shoot from all sorts of barrels: a round of pellets at hares who scream in pain like little children; with expansion bullets at deer and wild pigs, which shoot out the blood and intestinal contents of the badly wounded animals as “stalking signs,” so that in their flight, they leave traces for the searchers; they shoot at foxes which are directly driven from their dens by the hunting dogs; from high stands they shoot animals that have been lured by animal carcasses and in hunting drives, they shoot the animals they have set into panic. And in their hunting magazines they assure one another of what a joy hunting is for them.

The breath of God was exhalled - a hunter shot down the fox with no mercy.

It is a puzzling thing that such a “recre- ational sport” has not been forbidden long since in a “civilized country,” whose inhab- itants mostly consider themselves to be animal-lovers. Tradition, which lulled our ethical feelings to sleep, is no justification for the animal massacres. The time when humans hunted animals to survive has long since disappeared. If early humans had to kill animals, they asked their souls for forgiveness. 

"You shall not kill!"

 

It is particularly disconcerting when contemporaries who call themselves Christian take up arms in order to participate in the mass murder of animals. The commandment “You shall not kill!” was not limited to humans, and the peaceableness that Jesus of Nazareth taught was valid for all creatures.
This is why the Early Christians strictly rejected the killing of animals. They lived as vegetarians. And according to the community regulations of the Hippolyth, hunting was not in accord with the Christian faith. Whoever went on a hunt was cast out from the community. Only when Roman paganism gained entry into Christianity and the Church became a state religion, was killing again permitted – of people and animals, equally. Since then, the Church considers animals as beings without souls, which are available to humans, however they may like, as objects of hunting and experimentation.

The fairytale of the
"Neccessity" of hunting

 

Publicly, hunters try to pass off their bloody pastime as something that is “ecologically necessary.” Leading ecologists have meanwhile exposed these lies justifying the existence of hunting. They refer first to a basic law of nature: “Uncontrollable population growth to the point of self-destruction is seldom found in nature ..."

 Recent field studies in ecology have concluded that many animals possess an inner mechanism to regulate their population growth. For example, with elephants, it has been shown that it is not hunger or death, but the flexibility of the female animals at the beginning of their sexual maturity that determines the rate of growth. It is similar with foxes: “If foxes are not hunted and if there is sufficient food available, they tend to live together in family communities, which in the Fall consist of a male, ‘his’ female fox and normally, the young female foxes from the previous litter. Only the oldest female gives birth in this community, while her young daughters refrain from sexual activity for reasons of social factors not yet known in detail.”

When there is a threat of overpopulation, the rate of birth drops. This has also been established with deer, elk, ibex and other large mammals. Even many kinds of birds hold back on mating, depending on the density of their population. When many of their contemporaries are shot down, the non-mating individuals in reserve become active and more animals are bred than existed before the murder of the birds. All in all, there is no need for trigger-happy hunters to create a balance of nature and animals; in the long run, it adjusts on its own.

Hunting is not only unnecessary but damaging 

 

When humans interfere in the social structure of the fox population with flint and trap, stable structures are broken down through the constant re-formation of their social relationships. Established territories and animal pairs are dissolved. The male foxes seek out alternating female partners and the average number of whelps increases per litter.

That's "happy hunting," blessed by the church institutions.

And not least of all: Intense fox hunting in the fight against rabies becomes an unending absurdity. Young ani- mals without a ter- ritory move into terri- tories that become free. The rate of con- tact between foxes increases, heightening the danger of transmission. To this is added the fact that “in the social chaos of the intensively hunted field fox society, fights and even injuries are the order of the day,” so that “the rabies virus has the best chance of rapidly spreading.”

The population rejects hunting

 

Meanwhile, the war of hunters against the animals has been rejected by the majority of the population. More and more people are unhappy with the hunters who act as if they were the lords of the forest, frightening away hikers and, with ever larger shooting towers, making open spaces in nature look like the garden of a concentration camp along the way. Hunting destroys everything: the life of the animals, the beauty of the landscape and the peaceful enjoyment of open spaces in nature by humans and animals. Whole species have already been eradicated. Wolves, brown bears, lynx and wild cats, beavers and eagle owls, elk and many other animal species are present in only very few regions, and their existence    is threatened there as well. If hunters hadn’t had such an influential lobby in politics and society, their bloody recreational activity would have been forbidden long since.

At any rate, there is a growing counter movement in formation – an organization that is so powerful like the Association of German Nature Conservationists is demanding, for example, that a radical limit be placed on the catalog of animals open for hunting: all birds, beasts of prey like foxes, martens and polecats as well as smaller species of animals like hares should be protected throughout the year because their hunting is not only superfluous, but downright harmful.

The International Gabriele Foundation wel- comes such goals, which can gradually lead to stopping hunting. Meanwhile, it creates habitats that are large enough to diminish the pressure of hunting. Animals should again gain trust to human beings and no longer have to flee from them. For this reason, the foundation purchases fields and woods, in which animals may live in peace more and more and find their way back to unity with people.