bowhunter.eu

Technique · 11 September 2026

What Denmark measured, and what it did not

Before opening large deer to the bow, Denmark commissioned two reports. The figure that reached the press is 94%. The reports say more than that, and they say something else.

The commission

Denmark has allowed the bow since 1999, but only on roe deer, fox, hare and goose. To decide whether to open red, fallow and sika deer as well, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency commissioned two reports from Aarhus University, one in 2021 and one in 2022. Both are public and can be read.

What travelled out of them into the hunting press is a single number: 94% of the animals retrieved. The number is real. The trouble is that it travelled alone.

What was measured

The first report gathered 140 red and fallow deer shot with a bow between 2018 and 2021, set against the Danish tracking-dog register, together with a systematic review of the literature.

The second report went up to 282 shots, over 2018 to 2022, and added two things the first did not have: a questionnaire sent to tracking-dog handlers, and a forensic-medical assessment of what an arrow does inside a body, next to what a bullet does.

The authors call their own material the most comprehensive ever collected in Denmark on the subject. They also add, in the first report, a reservation we found in no press summary: set against the tracking-dog register, the material contains a number of errors and shortcomings and is not necessarily representative of bowhunting.

What the 94% means

The wording is precise, and the precision matters. Of all the shots, in 266 cases — 94% — the animal was found, and of those, in 235 cases it was found dead. In 55 cases, 21% of all shots, a tracking dog was called; 26 of those searches ended with the animal found and 29 without it.

So: not 94% killed on the spot, but 94% found. And at one shot in five a dog was needed, with more than half of those searches ending empty.

The wounding

Wounding, defined as animals hit and not recovered, is put at 8% in the first report and at 8–9% in the second. The first says that is less than in some foreign studies and more than in others; the second, that it matches the level in other studies of bowhunting.

Both reports add the same sentence immediately, and it is the one missing from every argument on the subject: no usable material exists for comparing the risk of wounding in rifle hunting. The 8–9% has no counterpart. Anyone using it to show the bow is worse than the rifle is using a figure with nothing to measure it against.

One thing appears in both as a tendency: experienced hunters wound fewer animals than inexperienced ones.

Where it comes out worse than the rifle

Here the reports are plain, and it is not in the bow’s favour.

The flight distance — from where the animal stood at the moment of the shot to where it fell — is longer with the bow than with the rifle. The first report uses the word substantially. The Danish figures match those from other countries, Finland included. The distance grows with the size of the animal, the same for both weapons.

The tracking-dog register shows longer tracks as well, and a lower probability of finding the animal with the bow than with the rifle.

The dog handlers, asked directly, say where the difference sits: at hits outside the heart-lung region. There the search becomes harder with the bow, the track lengthens and the chance of finding the animal drops. Several of them advise against shots that are not horizontal.

What the forensic pathologist says

The assessment in the second report compares the terminal ballistics of an arrow with those of a bullet. The expert’s conclusion is more careful than the summary that carries it: on the basis of the forensic literature and his own work, no decisive difference between the two weapons can be documented as regards survival time and pain. Survival time after an arrow must be assumed to be marginally longer.

On pain, he begins by saying it cannot be quantified objectively, in animals or in people, and continues with an assumption: a cutting wound, without the pressure a bullet raises in the organs around the channel, probably causes less pain.

Worth keeping in mind that this is a reasoned assumption, not a measurement.

The conclusion that matters

The literature review in the second report arrives at a sentence that ought to open any discussion of the subject: no studies exist that clarify the effectiveness of bowhunting in a scientifically secure way, neither absolutely nor in comparison with other forms of hunting. The authors say recent literature reviews in Norway, Sweden and Germany reach the same place.

And immediately after, they turn the question where nobody points it: several researchers call for a developed scientific basis for assessing the effectiveness of hunting with the rifle and the shotgun, which today are used as a consequence of convention and not of scientifically established criteria of effectiveness.

Hence their recommendation: each type of weapon should be assessed on its own terms, not only by comparison, because the modes of action and the terminal ballistics differ.

What Denmark did with it

It opened large deer to the bow from 1 January 2024 — but not simply. The Danish weapons order asks 80 joules of energy and a 33 g arrow for red, fallow and sika deer, a fixed point with at least three blades cutting 25 mm, and at § 6 it obliges the hunter to report digitally every shot, hit or miss, with the species, the type of bow and arrow, the form of hunting, the place, the hour, whether a tracking-dog handler was called, and a description of the shot.

That is what can be said without adding anything of my own: the measuring did not stop when the permission was given.

Still to check

Sources:

Citește articolul în română