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History · 10 October 2026

A hunter without a firearm

In Hungary you can become a bowhunter without ever firing a gun at the exam and without a firearms permit. The route has existed since 1993, survived an attempt in 1996 to strike the bow from the law, and is still in force. In Romania, anyone who wants to become a hunter goes through the firearm.

In Hungary, a person can become a hunter without ever having fired a gun at the exam and without holding a firearms permit. All they have to do is say, when they sign up for the course, that they want to hunt only with the bow.

That route has a history of more than thirty years, and a less quiet one than it looks. We read it in the texts: the decrees, the act, the government bill, the amendments in parliament and the votes. What it means today for a visiting hunter we wrote on the Hungary page; here we follow how it came about.

1990 and 1993: the bow comes in by the back door

Until 1990 the Hungarian rule was simple: useful game may be taken only with a firearm authorised for hunting. In August 1990, the 1990 decree added a one-sentence exception: hunting with a bow and with birds of prey is allowed with the permission of the county administration.

Two and a half years later, the 1993 decree dropped the permit. It put three things in its place. On big game, the bow had to be stronger than 50 pounds. Whoever hunted with a bow sat the state hunting exam with a bow exam added. And, in the paragraph on the hunting licence, a parenthesis: the licence requires a lawful firearm holding permit, “except for those who hunt exclusively with a bow or with birds of prey”.

That parenthesis is where the route begins.

1996: the act, and an attempt to strike the bow

In November 1995 the government laid before parliament the bill for a new hunting act. The bow was in it from the start, in several places:

Why the government put the bow into the act is written nowhere we read. The bill’s explanatory memorandum does not mention the bow; on hunting means it says only that the bill regulates them in detail on grounds of game protection, nature conservation and animal welfare, in line with international conventions.

In the spring of 1996 came two proposals to take it out.

At the end of March, the deputy Izsó Mihály (FKGP) tabled a package of amendments putting the bow, the crossbow and the arrow among the prohibited means. Izsó’s amendment sets out its reasons: the bow does not ensure a death without suffering, because its energy and accuracy are lower than a gun’s; silent shooting helps poaching and the killing of protected species; the targets of archery as a sport should not be living beings; with the bow the risk of a wound after which the search does not find the animal is much higher; and in the forest, on hunting grounds or in a protected area the bow would endanger public safety.

In April, two SZDSZ deputies, Hankó Faragó Miklós and Kiss Róbert, asked for the same thing, point by point: no bow permit, no exemption for the bowhunter from firearm shooting, no bow on big game, the bow among the prohibited means. The SZDSZ amendments end like this: bowhunting is extremely dangerous, it is silent, it is practically uncontrollable; it is unacceptable to revive it “to satisfy the hobby of a few people”; “the proper tool of game management is the gun”.

None of it passed. In the committees’ recommendation for the detailed debate, each of these points carries the same formula: in the agriculture committee not even a third of the members support it, the environment committee does not support it, and the government’s representative disagrees. The recommendation does not say why.

On 11 June 1996, in plenary, several of these amendments were put to the vote without anyone taking the floor and were rejected with more than 210 votes against, according to the parliamentary record. At one of them the chamber laughed: it was Izsó’s request to strike the ban on poisoned arrows. Read on its own, it sounded like a proposal to allow them; in his package it made sense, because every arrow would have been banned. The act was passed on 18 June 1996, with 208 votes for and 82 against, and came into force on 1 March 1997, with the bow in it.

Today

Today’s act ties the firearms permit to the kind of hunting, not to being a hunter. Hunting with a firearm requires a firearm holding permit; hunting with a bow requires the supplementary bow exam (§ 59). The hunting licence goes, from 18, to whoever has passed the hunting exam, is not under a licence withdrawal and has liability insurance; no paper from the police (§ 60). The 1996 police permit for the bow is no longer in the act; we have not established when or why it went.

The exam has kept the 1993 exception. The theory part on shotguns and rifles is now taken by everyone, the bowhunter included. But whoever wants to hunt exclusively with the bow declares it in writing when signing up for the course, may miss the at least 20 hours of firearm handling without consequence, and does not take the shooting test (§ 66 (2) of the act; the exam regulation, § 4 (7)–(8) and § 9 (1)). Like every bowhunter, they sit the bow exam: written, oral and shooting at eight distances.

The exemption from the shooting test is the same, in the same line of the act, for the bow, for hunting with birds of prey and for hunting with the Hungarian sighthound.

How many people take this route? We found no published official figure. We have only a chart on a Hungarian hunting blog, marked as coming from the hunting chamber, which gave the data to the author on request: 145 hunters took out a licence endorsed for the bow in the 2001–2002 season, 1,139 in 2022–2023. The chamber’s table is not published.

On what bowhunting has produced in practice, the figures are fewer still. The only document we found is the bowhunting association’s own, written to popularise bowhunting, on 491 kills reported by members up to 2007. The Hungarian association’s document gives an average shooting distance of 18 metres on big game. For the 281 big-game animals it had data on, the average flight distance is 72 metres; without two cases of 2 and 2.4 kilometres, it falls to 56 metres. The document counts only animals that were found and does not say how the data were collected, so it can say nothing about wounding.

In Romania

In Romania there is no route to a hunting licence that goes around the firearm. The Romanian hunting licence regulation, as it stands from 8 May 2026, requires for the exam file, in article 14, a medical certificate showing the person is fit to hold and use a hunting firearm, a criminal record certificate for the same, a psychological clearance for hunting arms and ammunition, and a document from an authorised shooting range attesting at least one session with a long firearm at a fixed target and at clay targets. There is no exception for someone who does not want to hunt with a gun. It would serve no purpose anyway: under Law 407/2006, article 42 (1) q), hunting with a bow is poaching. The details are on the Romania page.

What we do not know

What we think

These paragraphs are the author’s opinion, not a finding of any source.

We think what is worth taking from Hungary is not a draw-weight threshold or a list of species, but an idea: being a hunter is one thing, carrying a firearm is another. Hungary asks anyone who wants to hunt to know the game, the law, ethics and safety, firearm theory included, and asks for a firearm only from the one who hunts with it. Romania ties the two together from the first paper in the file. For anyone ever to hunt with a bow in Romania, it would not be enough to add the bow to the permitted means and take it out of the poaching offences, as the Romania page says. The route to the hunting licence, which today goes through the shooting range by obligation, would have to change too.

And something else caught our attention. Some of the Hungarian deputies’ arguments of 1996, the animal’s suffering, wounding, silent hunting that other people in the forest cannot hear, reappear in the Swedish organisations’ letters of 2026. No text makes the link; we do. Hungary heard them thirty years ago and kept the bow in the law. How that has turned out, in figures, we cannot yet say: the figures are exactly what is missing.

To check further

Sources:

Citește articolul în română