What many don’t know: Swiss hobby hunters shoot more than 10,000 roe deer fawns every year. At federal level, only a minimum closed season from 1 February to 30 April applies to roe deer.
Wild beim Wild editorial team — 25 May 2026
Roe deer fawn rescue in Switzerland: Who saves the fawns, and who shoots them?
EmailThe same hobby hunter who saves a roe deer fawn from being killed by a mower in spring takes aim at the fawns of that same year in the autumn.
Fawns are considered easier to shoot and are more popular with hobby hunters than older animals, partly because their meat is regarded as particularly tender.
This raises a question that is rarely asked in the annual celebratory reports about roe deer fawn rescues: who actually rescues the fawns, and who shoots them?
Who really rescues the roe deer fawns
In spring, images of rescued fawns proliferate, and the hunting community is almost always presented as the heroine. The sober reality is different. The rescue work is carried by the association «Rehkitzrettung Schweiz», which emerged from a research project at the Bern University of Applied Sciences for Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences (HAFL). It is a voluntary association with several hundred unpaid drone pilots, very few of whom hold a hunting licence.
Added to this are the farmers who report their mowing dates, as well as Swiss Animal Protection STS, which has been supporting the rescue effort with its own drone fleet since 2023. In the 2025 season, more than 6,400 roe deer fawns were secured in this way, with 722 teams in action searching more than 62,000 hectares. The driving force is therefore not hobby hunting, but an alliance of science, agriculture, volunteers and animal welfare.
Hobby hunters are nevertheless involved, but mainly for legal reasons: free-living wildlife may not be touched and moved by just anyone, which is why a trained hunter is almost always part of the team at regional level. His share in the actual searching and rescuing varies considerably from region to region. To sell the roe deer fawn rescue as an achievement of the hunting community is therefore a clever but misleading narrative.
Mower deaths do not only affect roe deer fawns
Spring mowing is fatal for far more animals than just roe deer fawns. Brown hares, ground-nesting birds such as the skylark and lapwing, amphibians and hedgehogs are also caught by the mowers, killed or mutilated. The roe deer fawn rescue is therefore only the most visible part of a much larger problem.
Anyone who thinks that mowing deaths have no legal consequences is mistaken. According to the Foundation for Animals in Law, a farmer can be held criminally liable for animal cruelty if vertebrates are killed or mutilated by the mower. The Animal Welfare Act provides for imprisonment of up to three years or a fine. The decisive factor is whether all reasonable protective measures were taken beforehand: anyone who has the field searched the evening before or fitted with deterrents and an accident still occurs is not liable to prosecution. Those who simply start mowing without precautions, however, risk a penalty.
What is striking is that the roles overlap. Quite a few farmers are themselves hobby hunters. The mower, the rescuer and the shooter can therefore be one and the same person.
What the federal statistics show
The Federal Hunting Statistics of the Federal Office for the Environment FOEN speak a clear language. From 2015 to 2024, the nationwide roe deer kill remained stable at around 42,000 to 44,000 animals per year. Of these, about 18,000 to 19,000 were adult bucks and around 14,000 were adult does. Young animals in their first year of life, listed in the statistics as buck fawns and doe fawns, together accounted for over 10,000 animals per year. In nine of the ten recorded years, the fawn kill exceeded 10,000; only in 2024 did it fall just below, at 9,520. The ten-year average is around 10,300 fawns shot, with the highest figure recorded in 2017 at 10,818 animals.
Roe deer shot in Switzerland by age class, 2015 to 2024
| Year | Buck fawn | Doe fawn | Fawns total | Roe deer total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 4’808 | 5’455 | 10’271 | 42’366 |
| 2016 | 4’774 | 5’434 | 10’233 | 43’399 |
| 2017 | 5’183 | 5’607 | 10’818 | 44’124 |
| 2018 | 5’150 | 5’570 | 10’784 | 42’389 |
| 2019 | 4’609 | 5’396 | 10’038 | 42’381 |
| 2020 | 4’734 | 5’455 | 10’212 | 42’969 |
| 2021 | 4’676 | 5’537 | 10’253 | 43’166 |
| 2022 | 4’919 | 5’607 | 10’602 | 42’722 |
| 2023 | 4’574 | 5’527 | 10’182 | 43’545 |
| 2024 | 4’256 | 5’201 | 9’520 | 42’404 |
Fawns total includes buck fawns, doe fawns and a small category of fawns not recorded by sex. Source: FOEN, Wildlife and Species Promotion Section, Federal Hunting Statistics.
In other words: while volunteers rescue over 6,000 fawns from the mower in spring, hobby hunters shoot more than 10,000 fawns in autumn. The source is not an estimate, but the official Federal Hunting Statistics.
The contradiction across the year
This is made possible by the hunting act. It only sets a minimum closed season for roe deer from 1 February to 30 April. Cantons may extend this closed season but not shorten it. In most cantons, roe does and roe fawns can only be hunted from autumn onwards, depending on the canton from October or November. Precisely when the fawns rescued in May and June have grown up, hobby hunting on this very age class begins.
And so the circle closes: the same hobby hunter who appears as a rescuer in spring can legally take aim at the fawns of the same year cohort in autumn. The hunting side justifies shooting fawns with population regulation and forest protection. Yet scientific studies show that forest regeneration depends above all on the quality of the habitat and large-scale planning, not on the highest possible kill numbers. A detailed analysis can be found in the dossier «Roe deer Switzerland: most-shot wild animal in hobby hunting».
There are also tangible reasons why fawns are particularly sought after. Their meat is considered especially tender, and a young, inexperienced animal is easier to kill than an older one. Following an appeal attributed to Tarzisius Caviezel in the «Bündner Jäger» and documented by Wild beim Wild, the shooting of fawns is openly promoted in hunting circles with reference to the tender meat. Caviezel was central president of the Grisons cantonal licence-hunting association until May 2026 and sits on the board of the national umbrella organisation JagdSchweiz, where he is responsible for communications. Those who wish to explore the contradiction between rescue and shooting in greater depth will find further background in the article on Caviezel’s withdrawal.
Nature has long been regulating itself
The hunting side justifies the shooting of fawns with the need to regulate the roe deer population. Yet of all things, this justification scarcely holds up against reality, because the strongest natural brake on the roe deer population is the fox.
For the Bernese Mittelland, it is estimated that a single fox kills on average around eleven fawns in the months from May to July. In the first weeks of life, when the young animals lie defenceless in the grass, predators such as the fox are among the most frequent causes of death. Just how strong this influence is became clear in Scandinavia: when mange caused the fox population to collapse, the number of fawns a doe led in autumn rose by 30 per cent, and the roe deer population as a whole by 64 per cent.
This leads to a double contradiction. Firstly, nature already regulates the roe deer population to a considerable extent, without any rifle. The more than 10,000 fawns shot each year do not replace this natural mortality, but come on top of it. Secondly, the very same hobby hunting that invokes regulation uses earth hunting and trap hunting to combat precisely those predators that would carry out this regulation free of charge. Those who persecute the regulator and then take up the gun themselves are not engaged in population management, but are intervening twice over in a system that maintains its own balance.
Two figures that must not be confused
For proper context, two distinct figures need to be distinguished — figures that happen to be similarly high. The first: Wildtier Schweiz estimates that around 10,000 roe deer fawns are killed by mowing machines each year. This is precisely what the rescue teams are fighting against. The second: according to official federal statistics, more than 10,000 fawns are additionally shot each year. The first figure is an estimate of mowing deaths, the second is a hard kill figure from the hunting statistics. Both are correct, but they describe two different causes of death.
A question of perspective
Whether there is a contradiction between rescuing in spring and shooting in autumn ultimately depends on one’s attitude towards hobby hunting. Those who fundamentally reject the killing of healthy wild animals as a leisure activity see a moral imbalance. Those who accept regulated hunting consider both compatible.
What remains factually solid, regardless: roe deer fawn rescue is not an achievement of hobby hunting. It is carried out by farmers, volunteer drone pilots and animal welfare organisations. And while in May they carry each fawn individually out of the grass, in autumn more than 10,000 fawns fall victim to the bullet. More on the rights of wild animals and on criticism of hobby hunting can be found in our section Animal Rights.