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History · 10 October 2026

The first eight years

From 1999, every Danish bowhunter had to say, every year, what they had shot. Two reckonings were made from their forms, one by the European bowhunters’ association and one by the Danish agency. They reached us only in English, only through the archive, and each counts differently. We read both.

On 1 May 1999 bowhunting in Denmark became hunting like any other. Until then the bow had been used only on individual permits. From then on, anyone who passed the exam could go out with a bow after roe deer, fox, hare, goose and small game.

But the freedom came with a condition, written into the 1999 order: say what you did with it.

What the order asked

Two sections of the order make everything that follows possible.

Section 16 required every bowhunter to report to the agency, by 1 May each year, how much game they had personally taken with the bow in the previous hunting year, on a form sent out by the agency; and to write zero if it had been zero. Anyone who did not send the report in time could lose the permit for the following year.

Section 15 required that, for a roe deer with sure signs of wounding not found within six daylight hours, the hunter call in an authorised tracking-dog handler.

So, from 1999, an archive was born: the hunters’ forms and, separately, the dog handlers’ reports. Two reckonings were made from it.

Two documents, and where we have them from

The first is an evaluation of the first five seasons, from October 1999 to January 2004, signed by Anders Gejer and Richard Cadwalader for the European bowhunters’ association. It is therefore a reworking by an interested party, not by the state. The page it was published on no longer exists; we read it in an Internet Archive capture from February 2014.

The second is a note by the Danish agency for the wildlife management council, covering 1999–2007. We have it only in an English translation with no signature and no date, published by the same European bowhunting federation and later taken off its site; we read it in a capture from June 2022. The Danish original we did not find.

The Swedish scientific council cites both too, in its 2021 opinion on bowhunting.

What the association counted

The association’s evaluation says that, besides the annual report, every hunter who took a roe deer filled in a special form, and that 99.4 per cent of the forms came back. The form does not appear in the text of the order; we know it only from the association.

The numbers, over five seasons: 576 arrows shot at roe deer, 533 roe deer taken. Eleven arrows missed cleanly, with no trace of blood on the arrow found. In 28 cases blood was found, on the ground or on the arrow, without the animal being taken: that is the wounding, 4.99 per cent of the 561 hits. Four more cases, with no blood and no arrow found, were added to the wounded under the agency’s rule; with them, wounding rises to 5.66 per cent.

The tracking dog was called four times. Two roe deer were found, at 30 and at 150 metres. The third was not found by the dog but was found dead the next day, at 130 metres. The fourth was never found. And one more roe deer, hit high in the back, fell paralysed on the spot and was dispatched with a knife; it is counted among the wounded too.

The rest of the evaluation describes how the shooting was done. Of the 576 arrows, 565 left a compound bow, six a recurve and five a longbow. 77 per cent of shots were taken at 20 metres or less, 79 per cent at broadside animals, 85 per cent at animals standing still. In 87 per cent of the roe deer found, the arrow had passed through the animal, and 87 per cent too were found within 50 metres of where they were hit.

The authors conclude that the 4.99 per cent wounding rate correlates well with the other ways of hunting roe deer in Europe. The evaluation does not say what the comparison rests on.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: the association’s tables do not quite agree with each other. The first adds up to 31 wounded animals over the five seasons, the second to 32; the difference is in the 2001/02 season, with 8 wounded in one and 9 in the other. The total of 32 is the one the 5.66 per cent comes from.

What the agency counted

The agency’s note covers eight seasons, to 2007, and counts differently. It starts not from the roe deer forms but from the annual report and the tracking-dog register.

In eight years, bowhunters took 989 roe deer. The tracking dog was called 164 times. 84 searches ended with the animal found, 70 without it, and 10 were check-ups after the hunter believed they had missed. Of the 70 negative searches, 29 are recorded by the dog handlers as “empty”, with no sign that the arrow had touched the animal.

From these figures the agency draws two limits. If every negative search and every check-up were a wounded animal, that would be 80 against 989 roe deer taken, or 8 in 100. If the “empty” searches and the check-ups are taken out, 41 remain, or 4 in 100. Wounding is, according to the agency, between 4 and 8 animals for every 100 taken.

It draws one more figure, the one that has travelled furthest: 989 roe deer taken, divided by the sum of them, the negative searches and the check-ups, gives 92.5 per cent. The agency puts it this way: of 100 roe deer shot at with a bow, 92 are taken. The formula, however, puts in the denominator only the roe deer taken and the dog searches; a shot after which nobody called the dog appears nowhere.

The last comparison is with the other weapons. Dog searches after an arrow succeeded in 51 per cent of cases. In the tracking-dog register for 2004/05, searches after a rifle succeeded in 58 per cent, after a shotgun in 37 per cent.

The agency writes its own reservations. The bow data are still few, so small changes in the number of searches move the percentages a lot. And bowhunters call the dog more and more often, including for check-ups after a doubtful shot that was most often a miss; this lowers the bow’s search success rate and can make the bow look less effective than it is.

Its conclusion: nothing indicates that the bow wounds more than other methods, and the results are at a level similar to hunting roe deer with a rifle.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: even the basic numbers do not agree between the two documents. The association counts 176 bowhunters in 1999/2000 and 454 in 2003/04; the agency, 348 in 2000 and 453 in 2007. The association gives 66 roe deer taken in the first season and 106 in the second; the agency, 67 and 113. They probably count different things, but neither document says what.

What it changed

The agency’s note says one more thing, perhaps the most important. In 2001 the agency had presented the council with a first evaluation report, whose basis, as far as wounding was concerned, was “very small”. That report, the note says, led to a revision of the rules, implemented in 2004: in essence, more energy required of the arrow.

The official text confirms the revision. The 2004 order, in force from 1 January 2005, replaced the 1999 one and kept the 40-joule minimum, but required 70 joules for an arrow with a mechanical broadhead on roe deer, fox, hare and goose, and for a blunt on small game. The 2001 report we did not find.

The association’s evaluation tells the moment differently: the five-year study, it writes, resulted in the “permanence” of the bowhunting legislation as of January 2005. The Danish bowhunters’ federation speaks, in its history, of a five-year trial for roe deer. The 1999 order, however, had neither an end date nor a trial period. What happened in January 2005 was a new order, with stricter rules for mechanical broadheads.

How to read it

These figures are good, and they are at the same time reporting figures, not observation figures. They were written by the hunters themselves, under the obligation to report. The only outside check is the tracking-dog register, and it sees only the searches for which someone called the dog.

The comparison with the rifle, in both documents, rests on tracking-dog success, not on a study of rifle wounding. No such study existed in Denmark even in 2021, as the Aarhus University reports write; we told that story in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”.

And the two documents do not call the same thing “wounding”: the association counts blood found, the agency counts searches without result. That is why one gives almost 5 per cent and the other 4 to 8. What happens when figures with different definitions are set side by side we wrote about in “What the wounding rate actually means”.

What we think

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

The lesson of the first eight years seems to us to be not the figure but its road. Denmark allowed the bow with an obligation to report, read what was reported, and tightened the rule where it thought it needed to; the link between the 2001 report and the 2004 rule is made by the agency’s note itself. Almost twenty years later, for red, fallow and sika deer, it did the same thing with a trial, an evaluation and a decision, which we followed in “How Denmark decided”. We think this is what is worth copying: not the permission, but the obligation to measure that comes with it.

To check further

Sources:

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