How Denmark decided

Denmark has allowed the bow since 1999, but not everywhere. Roe deer, fox and hare belonged to the archers from the start; red deer, fallow deer, sika, mouflon and wild boar stayed on the other side of the fence. For the first three of those, the gate opened between 2018 and 2024. Not all at once, and not on trust: step by step, in documents anyone can still read today.

The figures everything rested on we read in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”, and we do not repeat them here. This story is about people and paper: who decided, on what grounds, and what each of those sitting at the table asked for.

A trial with an end date

On 1 September 2018 the trial order of 2018 came into force. Its first section says plainly why it exists: a time-limited trial, to build a body of knowledge on which to judge, at the end, whether the bow had earned its place with these three species.

It was not a promise; it was a question asked with care. The rest of the text is built around it:

• An end date. The trial ran until 31 August 2021, with at most one year of extension (§ 2), and the order lapsed on its own at the end unless someone decided otherwise (§ 14).
• A brake. If situations arose that the trial was not looking for, animal-ethics ones included, the minister could change it or stop it early (§ 2 (3)).
• A mandatory reckoning. Within six months of the end, the Environmental Protection Agency had to evaluate, together with the parties concerned, the reports and the experience gathered, so that a decision could be taken on whether there were grounds for the bow on these species (§ 8).
• Controlled experiments. Besides the reports, the agency was to launch experiments on how effective the bow is on these species (§ 9).

The 2021 order used the spare year: the trial ran until 31 August 2022. The conditions were these: 80 joules and an arrow of at least 33 grams (about 509 grains), a fixed broadhead with at least three blades and 25 mm (annex 1); an authorised tracking-dog handler called in if a wounded animal is not found within six hours of daylight (§ 5); and, after every shot or kill, a digital report with the species, the bow, the arrow, the form of hunting, the place, the time and a description of the shot (§ 7). Every arrow left a trace on paper.

The pause

For four autumns running, from 2018 to 2021, a Danish hunter who had passed the bow test could go out after red deer, fallow deer, sika. In the fifth autumn, they could not.

It had been known since the spring. At the meeting of 7 March 2022 of the Wildlife Management Council (Vildtforvaltningsrådet, the minister’s advisory body, where the organisations of hunters, landowners, animal protection and nature conservation sit), the ministry said what came next: first an evaluation of the trial, then a political treatment, and only at the end of both the decision on whether the bow on large deer would stay. The agency also said what the road would cost: in the coming season, the bow would have no place with these species.

On 31 August 2022 the trial order lapsed, just as it had been written to lapse. What stayed standing was the general weapons order, the one from before, which allowed the bow on every huntable species except these three, mouflon and wild boar. Whoever had passed the bow test could go on hunting roe deer, fox, hare. Red deer, no.

Nothing new had been forbidden. The time had simply run out.

In September the agency told the council that the evaluation would come by the end of the year. The autumn passed without the bow on large deer. The evaluation reached the council’s table in February.

The meeting of 2 February 2023

The evaluation took the form of the two reports from Aarhus University, and one of their authors, Niels Kanstrup, brought it into the room. The minutes of the meeting gather the conclusions into five sentences. They are neither praise nor condemnation; they are what the researchers had found:

• animals shot with a bow run further than animals shot with a rifle;
• the probability of finding an animal shot with a bow is lower;
• it is not known whether the risk of wounding is higher with the bow;
• the effect of pain trauma is smaller with an arrow than with a bullet;
• there are indications that bowhunting can be done better, through equipment and through the way it is practised.

Then it was the turn of those at the table. Each spoke for the people they represented, and the minutes kept them in the order in which they spoke:

• Dyrenes Beskyttelse (animal protection): compared with the rifle, the bow is “second best”; the organisation cannot support making it permanent, but can support a temporary extension. And yet, in the same statement, it made a point of saying that the report’s indications are, on the face of it, in the bow’s favour. It asked for a better study of the wounding risk with the rifle, the shotgun and the bow.
• Friluftsrådet (outdoor recreation organisations): the bow on large deer should continue, especially since the pain effect is considerably smaller than with the rifle; and the way bowhunting is practised seems to make it safer than rifle hunting.
• Danmarks Naturfredningsforening (nature conservation): the trial should go on until the data are better.
• Dansk Skovforening (forest owners): make it permanent. It brought in support the Finnish study in the meeting’s annexes.
• Landbrug & Fødevarer (farmers) and Danmarks Jægerforbund (hunters): make it permanent, with a remark that came from the hunters themselves: the bow shooting test can be improved.
• Dansk Ornitologisk Forening (ornithologists): one concern only, the shooting angle, as a risk factor for wounding.

In the minutes, no one asked for the bow to be taken away. Where they differed was on how fast, and with how much certainty, to go on.

The council’s chair, Jan Eriksen, closed the item this way: the council wishes the bow on large deer to become permanent, with data collection continued for five years. At the end of the meeting he said it again: the recommendation goes to the ministry.

The public summary of the meeting adds two things that in the minutes appear only in some organisations’ statements: the council expects bowhunting training to be improved with the large deer in mind, and wants safety to stay in focus. The review of new data over the next five years starts from the 2022 report. The permission, in other words, came with homework.

“Unanimous”

The ministry told the story of the meeting in a single word. The August 2023 release says the council “unanimously” recommended to the minister that the bow become permanent, and the December 2023 release says the decision follows the council’s “unanimous recommendation”.

The minutes do not use the word, and neither does the public summary of the meeting. The minutes record that two organisations asked for something other than permanence: one, a temporary extension; the other, a continued trial. We set the two texts side by side and leave the reader to weigh them. It is not for us to decide which wording is the right one.

From recommendation to order

In March 2023 the agency told the council that the weapons order would be revised and that the new text would come into force by 1 September 2023 at the latest, with the opening of the season.

On 23 August, nine days before, came the August 2023 release. The public consultation had ended without a single objection. But the order had to be notified under a European directive and under the World Trade Organization’s agreement on technical barriers to trade, and that needed at least three months. Jens Skovager Østergaard, head of office at the agency, said it without hedging: “We know it is a disappointment for many bowhunters that they cannot, after all, go out with the bow after the large deer when the season opens on 1 September, as we had held out to them.” December at the earliest, he added, perhaps only the following season. “I can only regret it.”

The second autumn, too, passed without the bow on large deer.

The notification ended on 21 November 2023 with no comments to lengthen the road further, as the agency reported at the meeting of 13 December 2023. The environment minister, Magnus Heunicke, approved the order, and the permanent order came into force on the first day of 2024, on the same conditions as the trial. The December 2023 release also has a sentence for those who had waited: bowhunters had long been asking for this change.

Sixteen months passed between the end of the trial and the permanent order.

After

The permission did not close the notebook. The permanent order kept the reporting: a hunter who shoots at red, fallow or sika deer with a bow reports every shot (§ 6), as in the trial years.

The Aarhus project page, revised on 27 August 2026, gives the first figures of the permanent period: for 2023–2025, 174 shots reported, 10 of them misses; for 2018–2021, 4 misses out of 260 shots reported with complete data. And, honestly, the same page sets beside them a reservation we give in full: reporting was done through an online questionnaire, running since mid-2023, which technical problems and system errors affected and which anyone on the internet could open, not only bowhunters. For that reason the 2023–2025 data went through a severe quality check and, in some respects, can be presented only at a very general level.

The evaluation note for these three years was not published at the date of the page’s revision. Its cover already sits on the project page, title in place and the date still blank: “Dato: xx. Måned 20xx”.

What we think

This paragraph is the author’s opinion, not a finding of any source.

In March 2026 two Swedish nature conservation organisations, Naturskyddsföreningen and WWF, asked the Swedish agency not to introduce bowhunting. One of the arguments in the open letter of 23 March 2026 is that it is not responsible nature management to introduce a new method and evaluate its consequences afterwards. We think Denmark shows that between forbidding and introducing without evaluation there is another road: a trial with an end date, a brake and mandatory reporting, a public evaluation, and a decision taken after it, with every voice on record. It is a longer road. Denmark walked it to the end and paid for it with two autumns of waiting. The Swedish letter does not mention the Danish example, and we do not know how its authors would answer it.

To check further

• The DCE note for 2023–2025, still unpublished.
• How the recommendation actually sent to the minister after the meeting of 2 February 2023 was worded; we read the minutes and the public summary, not the letter.
• Where the 2018 decision to open the trial came from; the texts read here begin with the order.
• A matter opened in the council in June 2025 on whether bowhunting from a shooting platform fixed in a tree is lawful; we did not find it dealt with in the later minutes.

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