(I expect to revise and add to this over the next few days or weeks so check back)
Shortly after I got here I took the USAREUR (US Army Europe) Hunting Course. It lasted six weeks and cost $150. That may sound like a bit but for Germans to get a hunting license they have to generally study for about a year sometimes longer and spend well over €1,000. Once I got my certificate that I’d completed the course, I had to by a minimum of €1,000,000 insurance and then go to my Landratsamt in Haßurt and get my license. The license cost me €150 for three years. Then I had the right to go and purchase rifles and pistols and to get prior approval to buy up to two handguns. I have purchased a nice Rottweil Dopplebockflinte (over-under shotgun). Bowhunting is not allowed in Germany as it is considered cruel (but then they require you to club your fish over the head before you pull out the hooks, but that’s another story).
Hunting in Germany is a bit different than in the States. First of all, as you would expect by so much training, you have to learn a lot more about the animals. It’s as if at the end of the hunter’s safety course they gave you not just a written test but a shooting test and a oral exam in which imagine you were presented with a mounted young female grouse and asked, “is it a ruffed grouse or a pine grouse?” Or asked to describe the differences between the male whitetail and the female assuming that they are out of antler and you can’t see what they’ve got between their legs. We had to be able to tell the difference between Steinmarder (Stone Martens) and Baummarder (Pine or, literally, Tree Martens) for example and the rehwild (roe deer) stands about 3 feet tall on a good day and you hunt the males from the first of May to the end of January! Schwarzwild (wild boar) are hunted at varying times of year depending on the age and gender and woe to you if you shoot a female out of season. Of course, you probably won’t lose your weapon and get a hefty fine because there aren’t really any game wardens, not as we know them, but you might lose respect with other hunters which here might mean that you’d never hunt again!
That brings us to the most striking difference in hunting here. The hunting rights are leased over a period of many years and you don’t hunt on land unless the owner of the lease invites you to. You can buy a piece of land and not lease the rights (known as a Jagdrevier) but you’ll have to buy several hundred hectares in a country where most people’s houses actually touch (but land use planning is for another day). Every three years the owner (lessor really) of the Jagdrevier must negotiate with the farmers or foresters that work the land, sometimes they own the actual underlying land and sometimes they lease it as well (think feudalism). The negotiations center around how many rehwild (and rotwild (red deer) if the Revier has them) the Jäger will kill. Here’s the part that usually blows American’s minds: the Jäger wants this number to be low, the farmers would prefer the Jäger kill everything that moves. They don’t bother to negotiate over pigs because 1) they don’t have a territory, and 2) they are so destructive that the Jäger is expected not only to kill all he or she (in which case she’s a Jägerin) sees but to call all of his or her friends who have hunting licenses as well.
So, say you have an area of about 250 hectares of mostly fields. You may be required to kill, say, six rehbok (bucks) and five rehgeiss (does). You will actually have a three year plan and you can carry forward or backward if necessary. In other words, the plan would be for 18 rehbok over 3 years and you would be expected to divide it up roughly evenly but if you shot 7 the first year you could get away with only shooting 5 the next. At the end of the three years you would settle up with the farmers and if you hadn’t shot enough you’d owe them money for the damage to their crops and if you were lousy enough they could ask a county official to cancel the whole lease and lease the Revier to someone who could hunt. At the same time you’d negotiate the next three years and the farmers would argue that there was lots of damage to their crops and you’d bring all your vast knowledge of wildlife to bear and explain how it was really the häse (hares) that were doing the damage and you couldn’t possibly be expected to kill as many deer as before because you’d just about cleaned them out.
Then there’s the meat. Hmm, how do I explain this? Well, if you own a Revier, you have the right to all the meat from all the wild animals that die within your Revier and that includes the right to sell it; actually you’d better sell it to raise money to pay for the Revier (they ain’t cheap) and to pay for any damage you have to pay for. So, if you don’t own a Revier, and you go hunting on someone’s land, you have the right to keep the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys – that’s about it, those are known as the Jagdrecht (Hunter’s right) and you don’t pay for them. All the rest you pay for if you want it or you put it in the Revier owner’s meat cooler so he or she can sell it. On a Rehbok you generally get the trophy which means you get the head but nobody does full head mounts – instead you skin the head and clean the meat off then cut the top off and boil it and mount this top of the skull with antlers. Every year you are required to bring all of these from the past year to town to show them off at an annual festival. If you hunt boar you will be expected to buy the meat if you take the trophy. If you shoot a red deer you better be prepared to pay thousands of Euro for the trophy because you are going to pay for it. If you don’t want to do that either shoot a female or don’t hunt red deer (which are like Elk by the way).
There’s a lot of history to this stuff going back a thousand years or more, though it basically was all made up by Herman Göring in the 30s.