Bernd Carpenter

The beautiful nature gives people a truly good feeling. More than 27,000 men and women in green turn the fields red every year to share the shot animal with loved ones through the creation of suffering.
Whether it’s a nuisance, overcrowding, or just for fun, many animals are outlawed in seasons that run from August to the end of January. The time of harvesting game.
Is it a natural instinctive phenomenon that is useful or is it one of the colorful crimes of man in a bestial history?

Around the age of 18, you can get a driver’s license and a hunting certificate. The Dutch Hunting Training Foundation (SJN) gives courses that last 1 year. A theory exam and three practical components ensure that there is a hunter who can handle the rifle safely. Then five animals are the hare in a period when shooting is allowed just like setting off fireworks on a last day. Rabbits, hares, pheasants, mallards and wood pigeons must be killed because there are no natural enemies, say the hunters, and the State of the Netherlands has decided. That’s called managing populations to make sure there aren’t too many of a species. Roe deer, red deer, fallow deer and wild boar have involuntarily adopted humans as predators. Throughout the year, the killing does not end, because when there is agricultural damage (or better when man thinks there is one), then in principle all animal species can get the green man and woman after them. The chief of the regional police force issues the hunting licenses and without the certificate it is not possible to shoot with the bullet. But that is of course only a theoretical option because the men and women in green are there in large numbers.

Hunting on foot, from a boat, yacht in a seat or high seat, pressure hunting and drift hunting, the methods of the men and women in the green. The herding method is perhaps the most bizarre. Groups of hunters chasing animals in one direction with other hunters ready to shoot happily. In 2016, 13,000 hares and 1,500 pheasants were shot in South Holland alone. Hunting is hunting, managing and fighting. It seems like the most normal thing in the world. Surgical interventions in nature or soldiers who eliminate enemies of nature and thus restore balance. The animal seems to be protected by the ”No, unless principle” regulated in the Flora and Fauna Act. This Act replaced a number of other laws, the Birds Act, the Hunting Act, the Useful Animals Act and the Endangered Alien Species Act. The Flora and Fauna Act has been in force since 2002. An improvement, yes, but the animal is not yet safe.

It’s all about the sensible use of nature in wildlife management… Man as prosecutor, judge and executioner who works ruthlessly to do what is best. It all sounds so beautiful and almost poetic. The hunter is going to harvest, sit down, bear hares for the foot or pick at them. The killing is even seen as a side effect, because it’s about the game. The shot is actually a pitiful part of a preoccupation with nature: being one with the almost divine Being. Speaking of God, He has been hijacked by the hunters. At the beginning of November, you can hear his name sounding as the horns blow. Saint Hubert is the patron, the patron saint of hunters, furriers and miners, butchers, hunting horn blowers and a few other craftsmen. Beautiful traditions that we don’t want to lose. Saint Hubert who gives protection against rabies. Someone suspected of rabies was cut on the head with a thread from the stole of Saint Hubert. Dogs were more unlucky. They were given ”the Hubertus key” burned into their foreheads. Until the nineteenth century, dogs received their “blessing” with a red-hot key on “Trinity Sunday”. That doesn’t happen anymore, but hunting with bells and whistles still does.

Traditions are there to be preserved, as long as others don’t suffer from them. Is there a necessity and are alternatives absent? Farmers who are troubled by animals should first try blasters, ribbons, flags, fences, scarecrows and what not before they hire the farmer emergency services and ghostbusters who shoot live ammunition. An army of between 27,000 and 30,000 people to shoot more than 1.1 million birds and mammals, kill 600,000 animals in the context of damage control plus 120,000 muskrats and more than 3.4 million mice and rats by poison and also gas the city pigeons and moles in traps. That is a double standard, a bloodthirsty double standard. People in need get help whether there are too many of them or not. Animals are and will always be numbers to do whatever man wants. Catching and helping versus shooting and skinning.

An army hired to kill animals sitting with your gun ready, low or high with floats or not chasing the animals while the question of whether it is really necessary seems irrelevant. In addition to the other question of whether humans have the right to commit mass murders of animals every year, there are numerous arguments why pleasure hunting is a tradition that gives more victims than Zwarte Pieten in the winter. Hunting is simply fun for people who want to shoot at living creatures, hunters do not contribute anything substantial to nature management within extensive livestock farming, hunters are just butchers in the field who want to “harvest” to eat most of the time, it is often about alleged damage that simply forms a legitimization in a game of those who have the power to kill animals (or have them killed), there is insufficient control of hunting, one in six animals is only shot and because of the shooting, animals become shy and frightened within nature that is not allowed to be called nature in the Netherlands since they are areas with fences around them. Hunting must be discussed. But let’s hunt, hunt, hunt that defenseless animal with a hat on and a nice warm coat on. It is quiet in Hilversum and on the streets.

Is it possible that in autumn and winter there is not only attention for Sinterklaas and his helpers?

Could it be that next year there will be buses with protesters to the hunting grounds that hopefully will not last forever and that newspapers will be full of people who want to get rid of a tradition that is a genocide of animals every year?

Those who are sweet get treats and those who are animals are called the bullet. A tradition with Saint Hubert and men (and women) in the green. Sometimes the world is black and white.