bowhunter.eu

History · 12 September 2026

What was read before the decision

Denmark opened large deer to the bow on the strength of two reports. Their bibliography holds four documents from four countries. We read them all, and one more written by the bowhunters themselves. They do not say what either side would like to hear.

Where the list comes from

The guide on this site says what the law says in each country. This article looks at what lay on the table before a law was written.

The best-documented case is Denmark. To decide whether to open red, fallow and sika deer to the bow, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency commissioned two reports from Aarhus University, which we wrote about separately. The first, the Danish report of 2021, states its own purpose: to complete the basis for a decision on legislation.

At one point the report finds that the existing material — reports not reviewed by specialists, opinions, interviews, data reported by hunters — gives no rigorous picture of the effectiveness of bowhunting, and that no scientific studies exist on which a secure assessment could rest either. It adds that this is supported by similar recent analyses from Sweden, Germany and Norway, and names them. The same bibliography holds the Danish statement of 2017, from the animal ethics council.

We read those four in full, plus a document almost all of them cite: the summary of a trial run in Sweden by the national bowhunting federation. What follows is what they say.

Denmark, 2017: an ethics council divided

The Danish statement is a six-page letter to the environment minister, dated July 2017. The address in the Danish bibliography no longer responds; we read it from an Internet Archive copy.

The council had spoken twice before. In 1993 it said bowhunting could not be regarded as an ethically acceptable form of hunting, because even under ideal conditions it cannot ensure a kill as quick and effective as modern firearms allow. In 1998 a majority of members found no reason to change that conclusion. In 1999 the bow was legalised anyway, for small game and roe deer.

By 2017 things had moved. The Danish statement counts 348 bowhunters in 1999 and 2,249 people holding a Danish bow licence in 2016, 49 of them foreigners. It also gives a figure we have not seen quoted anywhere else: in 2016 the shooting test was passed by 83.1% of bow candidates, 77.8% of rifle candidates and 59.7% of shotgun candidates.

The council names two things it considers decisive: the time from impact to loss of consciousness, and the risk of wounding. On what it found in the material it speaks carefully, and nearly every sentence carries a “possibly”. Bowhunters’ shooting skill is on a par with that of firearm hunters, possibly better. With the right bow, broadhead, distance and shot placement, the animal can possibly die within the same interval as with a firearm. The wounding risk may possibly be at the level of the rifle and below that of the shotgun. But the studies known to the council are old or come from countries with other rules, and the effectiveness of the bow under the conditions required in Denmark is insufficiently documented. Taken together, the council says, the material gives an unclear picture.

Then the council splits. Some members oppose the sporting element of hunting on principle, and see it as prominent in bowhunting; for them the uncertainty is one more reason not to allow it, and they would withdraw the 1999 permission as well. The others have no objection in principle and ask one thing only: that the bow be at least on a par with the other weapons. All agree that a final position must wait for the data.

The recommendations are concrete. The criteria by which the bow is judged should be fixed in advance. The weapon used and the species shot should be recorded in more detail, when reporting to the game statistics and when calling a tracking dog. And at the end, a sentence that turns towards the other weapon: there may also be a need to evaluate the shooting-skill requirements for hunting with firearms.

The Danish weapons order today obliges the hunter to report every bow shot at red, fallow and sika deer, hit or miss; the details are on the Denmark page. We have no text saying the recommendation led to the obligation. We say only that the recommendation dates from 2017 and the obligation from 2024.

Sweden, 2020: a scientific council that does not decide

Sweden has banned the bow since 1938. In 2018 the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency sent out for consultation a draft that would have allowed it, then decided to investigate further. The scientific council for animal welfare of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences received the request from four animal-protection and nature-conservation organisations, together with the environment agency. The opinion dates from March 2020, and the Swedish report, its published form, from 2021.

The 2018 draft deserves an aside: compound bows only, at least 40 J, an arrow over 25 g with a head of at least three blades and 25 mm, every outing with shots reported within 24 hours — and, beside the Swedish hunting exam, an IBEP exam. IBEP is a private course certificate; the draft would have raised it to a legal condition. It never came into force: the Swedish report of 2021 still describes the bow as banned.

The sentence from the report that travelled is this: compared with hunting with a rifle or shotgun, bowhunting presents animal-welfare risks, above all as regards the time from shot to unconsciousness, and wounding. It is in the report. But it is the first of a series, and the rest of the series did not travel.

In its conclusion, the council writes straight after it that rifle and shotgun hunting also lack studies describing the welfare risks, that it therefore cannot be excluded that the bow even has certain advantages, and that for these reasons direct comparisons are not possible. The overall assessment, it says at the end, gives no unambiguous picture: depending on whose interests and which values come first, bowhunting can be either defended or criticised.

The summary of the Swedish report holds one more observation we had met before: rifles and shotguns were not legalised on ethical principles of minimising unnecessary suffering, but are in use as a result of tradition and custom; the Danish report of 2022 says the same in other words: rifle and shotgun are used by convention, not on scientifically established criteria of effectiveness.

To read the Swedish document correctly one more thing needs knowing, and it is written on the council’s page of definitions: assessing risk is its job, managing risk — the decisions — is not part of its remit. The report is not a yes or a no to the bow, and by the council’s own definition it cannot be. On the same page the council notes that the notion of “unnecessary suffering”, though it stands in Swedish law, has no uniform definition.

A trial in enclosures, and the journey of a figure

Sweden did have a bow trial after all. With the environment agency’s permission, from 1998, the Swedish bowhunting federation organised hunts in game enclosures; the sources give different periods, between 1998 and 2002. Participants were strictly selected — the Swedish exam for all weapon classes, at least five years of hunting, the Danish bow exam and IBEP — and paid their own costs. According to the Swedish report, 22 fallow deer and 8 wild boar were taken.

What circulates under this trial’s name is the federation’s summary, a page from its website; the site no longer responds today, so we read it on the Internet Archive. The federation’s conclusion: in effect, the bow is well comparable with the permitted weapons. The Swedish report judges the trial more coolly: because it was run in enclosures, with limited freedom of movement for the animals, it is hard to draw firm conclusions about welfare from it, and the federation’s report is neither published nor scientifically reviewed. The federation itself writes that a trial in an enclosure cannot be fully compared with hunting free-ranging game, and that the good results may also be explained by the selection of participants.

It is worth following what happened to one figure. The federation’s summary gives the distances the animals travelled after the hit and adds that these should correspond to times of under 20 seconds in most cases. The table has no time column: the 20 seconds are an inference, stated in the conditional. In the Hannover study of 2021, the same figure appears in the indicative — flight times were frequently under 20 seconds. Along the way, an estimate came to be read as a measurement.

The federation’s summary also claims an “extremely low” wounding rate, without giving the number of shots or misses. In its own table, one wild boar is listed as not found.

Germany, 2021: questionnaires, and what they cannot say

The Hannover study, signed by Jessica Schmidt and dated May 2021, is a project paper: that is what the cover of its second version calls it, where the author appears with a bachelor’s degree. The cover of the first version carries the name of the wildlife research institute of the veterinary university there. It is not about Germany: it analyses 430 questionnaires filled in between 2011 and 2019 by hunters around Madrid, after bowhunting wild boar in urban areas and feral goats in protected areas, and compares them with the Danish data. The question is whether the bow can reduce populations where firearms are not allowed.

The figures: shots were most often taken at 14–18 m. For 8% of the animals a further arrow, a knife or a firearm was needed, mostly when the first shot came from beyond 18 m; beyond 23 m, for one animal in five. Half the animals ran up to 40 m, whatever the shooting distance. The author supports the recommendation not to shoot from further than 20 m.

On broadheads the result is honestly unclear. With a mechanical head the animals travelled the shortest distance on average; with a two-blade head the time to collapse was shortest on average. The differences, the author writes, were small. Nor does the literature she cites agree: one study links more blades to a shorter flight, another finds better recovery rates with mechanical heads. Denmark, meanwhile, requires a fixed head by law for large deer.

The most valuable part is something else: the critique of the questionnaires. In the Spanish data the author finds that of 222 sows shot only one is recorded as pregnant, which is improbable for the species; that answers on the same form contradict each other; that in 2018 and 2019 every animal is recorded as killed with a single arrow, unlike in the years before. And of the Danish questionnaires she writes that they were sent out in February–March and returned by May, under threat of losing the licence, which may have led to embellished data. The Danes, in their first report, had already said themselves that their material contains errors and gaps.

The study’s conclusion: under controlled conditions and with rigorous selection, bowhunting may possibly be an effective tool for reducing populations in urban or protected areas. Followed by a call for standardised studies, because questionnaires alone are not enough.

Norway, 2018: the yardstick, built for the bullet

The fourth work on the Danish list is an article in Scientific Reports, 2018, by Stokke and his colleagues, with authors from institutes in Norway, Sweden and the United States. Its idea is simple to state. Suffering cannot be measured directly. Time to loss of consciousness is hard to clock in the field, because large animals vanish into cover before they fall. Flight distance, on the other hand, can be measured, and it depends on body mass. The authors give a formula for the distance expected after a lethal hit, and a threshold beyond which, they argue, the animal is wounded rather than fatally struck.

The paper is about the rifle: the model starts from the impact of the bullet. Arrows come up in a single passage, and not for the flight-distance threshold but for the part that estimates how much blood a wound loses. The authors write that they believe their model can be used for wounds with clean-cut edges, since wounds cut by broadheads or knives might mirror the shape of the cutting edges, but that the modelling could be complicated. Nowhere does the paper apply the flight-distance threshold to the bow.

The article also holds the sentence that recurs, in one form or another, in all the others: despite the interest and the “best practices” put forward, there is a persistent lack of scientific studies that quantify welfare in hunted mammals, starting with wounding rates. Stokke and his colleagues write it about hunting with the rifle.

What shows when you set them side by side

The four documents were written by different people, in different countries, for different purposes. Set next to each other, they say a few things alike.

If anything can be said without adding something of our own, it is that the question “is the bow better or worse than the rifle” does not yet have an answer in any of the documents read by those who decided. And the most careful of the authors ask for the same thing: data.

Still to check

Sources:

Citește articolul în română