Just a few days after the start of the 2024/2025 Italian hunting season, the first “Bollettino della guerra,” the “war bulletin,” from the Associazione Vittime della Caccia (AVC) is on the table. A document that sounds like a situation report from a conflict zone, not like statistics on a state-sanctioned recreational activity. It lists the dead and wounded, day after day, region after region.
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What the figures show is that recreational hunting in Italy is not only a massacre of wild animals, it is also an underestimated safety risk for the population.
AVC is a citizens’ organization of victims and their families that has been systematically collecting media reports and local police reports on hunting accidents for years because the state itself does not maintain complete official statistics. The organization has made its dossiers publicly available since 2007 and explicitly permits the further use of the data, provided the source is acknowledged.
The first bulletin of the 2024/2025 season already documents several deaths and injuries in the first two weeks of the so-called “pre-season”:
- Two amateur hunters who died while pursuing their hobby
- Other amateur hunters who were seriously injured
- Two women killed by their own father or husband with a hunting weapon, in a private setting, but with the same weapon that is supposed to be used as “sports equipment” on weekends.
This pattern runs through all years of the AVC dossiers: It is not only the shooters themselves who die or are maimed, but also people who have nothing to do with hobby hunting, except that they happen to be nearby or live with someone who has access to a hunting rifle.
68 victims in one season, over 800 in a decade
The 2023/2024 season gives an idea of the scale of the problem. According to the AVC, 68 people were hit by hunting weapons in that single hunting season: 12 died and 56 were injured.
The breakdown reveals the implications for the general public:
- 28 of the victims were not hobby hunters, including 6 dead and 22 injured, 7 of whom were children and teenagers.
- 40 of the victims were amateur hunters, including 6 dead and 34 injured.
Hobby hunting therefore not only kills those who participate voluntarily, but also regularly affects walkers, farmers, mountain bikers, local residents and children on their way to school.
A report on the work of the “Vittime della Caccia” observation center summarizes long-term data: In the last ten years, 630 people have been injured and 204 killed in Italy in direct connection with hunting activities or hunting weapons.
In addition, there are seasonal figures that reflect a permanent state of emergency: Between September 1, 2024 and January 5, 2025 alone, AVC registered 53 people killed or injured by hunting weapons, including 13 minors.
These are not “tragic isolated incidents.” This is a structural problem.
A walk in the woods as a safety risk
Animal welfare organizations like OIPA are now openly speaking of a “public safety problem” and are calling on the government and parliament to take action. In a joint analysis with AVC, OIPA points to the same finding: year after year, it also affects people who are “simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” for example, while taking a walk in the woods or on the path in front of their own house.
The case studies in the reports read like a horror chronicle of normality:
- An elderly man standing in the garden is hit by a stray bullet.
- A family traveling by car is shot at near a gathering.
- Children playing outdoors are caught in the line of fire.
Many of these cases only make it into the local news, not into national awareness. That’s precisely why the activists speak of “Bollettini della guerra” (newspapers of war): they are trying to make the diffuse, invisible violence visible.
The invisible dead in the system
Particularly concerning: Italy still does not maintain comprehensive, official statistics on hunting accidents resulting in human casualties. Environmental lawyers have been pointing out for years that there are no centrally maintained, government-run figures, even though people are regularly killed or seriously injured.
What is known comes almost exclusively from civil society, from painstakingly compiled overviews like those from AVC. The organization analyzes press reports, police reports, and local media. What no one reports doesn’t appear in the statistics.
It must therefore be assumed that the actual number of incidents is higher. Several years ago, a major Italian daily newspaper reported that between 2011 and 2021 alone, there were over 200 deaths and almost 700 injuries due to hunting accidents.
How the hunting lobby downplays the danger
While AVC and animal welfare organizations warn of an ongoing “human tragedy”, the hunting lobby tells a different story.
Associations like the “Cabina di regia del mondo venatorio” and hunting-related magazines publish their own analyses and frequently report declining numbers and “ever-increasing safety.” In a joint report on the 2024/2025 season, they point out that the number of injuries in 2024 was 34, significantly lower than the previous year. However, they also acknowledge that between September 1, 2024, and January 30, 2025, there were a total of 62 hunting accidents resulting in 14 fatalities.
On hunting websites, these figures are often put into perspective by comparing them to the number of hunting licenses or the number of “hunting days completed” to give the impression that hobby hunting is practically as safe as a Sunday outing.
What is consistently ignored in this process is:
- This is not about a voluntarily accepted risk, as in climbing or mountaineering, but about people who are involuntarily affected.
- There are no protected areas in the landscape that are free from hunting.
- The risk is borne by the general public, not by the hunting community alone.
The message from the hunting lobby is: Everything is under control. The reality, as told in the “war bulletins,” tells a different story.
Hunting weapons in the house: From “hobby” to domestic violence
The AVC’s statistics include not only classic hunting accidents in the field, but also homicides in domestic settings involving hunting weapons. The first bulletin of the 2024/2025 season already lists two women who were shot dead by a family member with a hunting rifle.
Here, too, the pattern is clear: Every additional firearm in a household increases the risk of lethal violence. Studies from other countries have shown for years that legally available weapons play a central role in mass shootings, suicides, and domestic violence. The Italian situation confirms this on a smaller scale.
Those who legitimize recreational hunting not only legitimize the killing of animals in practice, but also create easier access to deadly weapons that can become the “solution” at any time in a family conflict or a psychological crisis.
Europe’s blind spot: Hunting as a security problem
The Italian example is not an exotic exception. In Switzerland, an average of around four recreational hunters die each year while pursuing their hobby; serious accidents involving third parties also occur regularly here.
What is particularly noticeable in Italy, however:
- The density of hunters in some regions
- The long hunting season with pre- and post-openings
- The proximity between settlements, agricultural areas and hunting grounds
In addition, there is a close connection between hunting associations and politics, which critics have been documenting for years.
The result is a security regime in which the right of a minority to recreational ballistics is given greater weight than the right of the majority to move about outdoors without fear of rifle bullets.
What this means for politics
When a civil society organization calls its accident statistics “war bulletins,” it’s not an exaggeration, but a sober description of the record. The numbers speak for themselves:
- Dozens dead and injured every season
- Hundreds of victims in a decade
- Children, women, and bystanders were among those affected.
- No complete government statistics, no serious political debate about drastically restricting recreational hunting
As long as politicians ignore this reality, they bear partial responsibility for every additional bullet that hits a pedestrian, every child hit by a shotgun blast, every woman shot dead in her own living room with a “sporting weapon”.
Hunting is not a “hobby”, it is a risk for everyone.
The first war bulletin of the 2024/2025 season from the Associazione Vittime della Caccia is more than a press release; it is a distress call. It makes it unequivocally clear: recreational hunting in Italy is not a harmless traditional sport, but a persistent security problem that affects society as a whole.
Anyone who continues to claim that hunting “only” affects animals ignores the fact that people die every year because someone, somewhere, feels the need to shoot at living targets in their free time.
As long as governments in Rome, Bern or Brussels dismiss this violence as an unavoidable side effect of a “nature-oriented hobby”, the war bulletins of the victims’ associations will only get thicker.
The only responsible response would be to do exactly what OIPA, AVC and many others have been calling for for years: recognize recreational hunting as a safety risk, massively reduce hunting weapons and actually protect nature instead of turning it into a shooting range.
Exposing the Big Game 