By KAALTV
Updated: November 8, 2025 – 6:42 PM
Published: November 8, 2025 – 2:49 PM

(ABC 6 News) — Minnesota Governor Tim Walz celebrated the opening weekend of the state’s firearms deer hunting season in Goodhue County on Saturday, November 8.

Gov. Walz was hosted by Dan and Mary Lundell on their private land near Cannon Falls.

Later, Gov. Walz visited a chronic wasting disease )CWD) check station with Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Commissioner Sarah Strommen. They talked with hunters who brought in deer to be sampled for CWD.

“Deer season is a special time in Minnesota, whether this is your first hunt or part of a family tradition passed down for generations,” said Gov. Walz. “Minnesota is known as a premier deer hunting destination, supporting communities across the state. I always enjoy time in the deer stand and the connection it brings to the outdoors and to one another. I wish all Minnesota deer hunters a safe, enjoyable, and successful season.”

“Deer hunting connects us to the outdoors and to our family and friends, supports Minnesota communities, and plays a vital role in managing our state’s deer populations,” said Strommen. “I’m grateful to the nearly 400,000 hunters who take part in the firearms deer season each year with tradition, safety, and conservation in mind.”

Hunting contributes more than $1.2 billion annually to Minnesota’s economy and supports jobs in tourism, outdoor recreation and rural communities across the state.

It is also one of the most effective tools the DNR uses to manage deer populations. Hunters play a key role in maintaining population goals and contributing to the overall health of Minnesota’s landscapes, ecosystems, and economy.

More information on deer hunting, including safety resources and learn-to-hunt information, is available on the DNR website.

In the canton of Graubünden, the high season for hunting has barely ended, and already the rifles are being oiled for the next hunting phase.

Editorial staff , November 2, 2025

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Not only in the canton of Graubünden does the annual aftermath of the high hunt begin with the special hunt.

While deer, roe deer, and chamois are long since exhausted and prepared for winter, amateur hunters are once again venturing out. What is officially considered “regulation” is in reality an attack on the last vestiges of peace and quiet enjoyed by wild animals. This is precisely the time when wild animals should be conserving energy, building up fat reserves, and finding rest to survive the long winter. Instead, they are once again disturbed, hunted, and killed under the guise of a supposedly “sustainable” forest and wildlife policy.

Over 3,400 red deer, 2,500 roe deer, and almost 3,000 chamois have already been massacred, but according to the Graubünden Office for Hunting and Nonsense, that’s not enough. Now, a so-called special hunt is underway to further “decimate” the red deer, roe deer, and chamois populations.

The justification is always the same: forest and wildlife must remain in balance. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that this “decimation” has long since become an end in itself, and the balance the authorities speak of is above all else: cruel and man-made. The special hunt serves to simulate high wildlife populations so that they can be “decimated” again the following year. A perverse system that perpetuates itself at the expense of the animals.

The narrative of the endangered forest

Officially, the special hunt is intended to protect the forest. Too many deer and roe deer are said to be eating young trees. But this argument falls short or deliberately obscures the fact that the problem is not the animals, but rather forest management. The protective forests in Graubünden are fragmented by forestry, tourism, ski slopes, recreational hunting, and road construction. The natural habitat of the wildlife has shrunk, refuges are lacking, and the animals are constantly disturbed by recreational hunters. Instead of addressing the root causes, the focus is on fighting the symptoms: the animals themselves.

Special hunting: Regulation without end

This year, a further 1,711 female deer and calves, 281 roe deer, and ten chamois are to be culled in Graubünden. The targeted hunting of mothers and their offspring is particularly problematic from an animal welfare perspective. It leads to stress, suffering, and frequently results in inappropriate shootings. Often, injured or orphaned young animals are left behind, dying a miserable death—a situation that is hardly compatible with modern wildlife ethics.

The authorities call it “population management.” In reality, it’s a self-perpetuating hunting machine: High game populations are provoked by earlier interventions, which then justify further interventions—a perpetual cycle of killing and subsequent regulation.

The targeted hunting of female animals and calves for recreational purposes is contrary to animal welfare and ethically unacceptable.
Mother animals are torn from their herds, calves are left to wander or die. This is called “herd management,” but in reality, it is a systematic form of animal cruelty.

Furthermore, repeated hunting in a short period causes chronic stress for the animals. Their flight instincts remain active for weeks, leading to increased energy consumption and higher mortality rates in winter. This practice contradicts all forms of wildlife biology and ethics.

The wolf as a natural regulator – undesirable

Particularly absurd is the fact that the wolf, which could act as a natural regulator and thus fulfill the role of special hunting practices, is being politically opposed and shot. In a functioning ecosystem, the wolf would do precisely what recreational hunters now demand: it would select for weak animals, adjust populations, and restore natural balance.

However, in Graubünden, the wolf is still considered a nuisance. It is referred to as “problem animals” and “conflict areas”—terms primarily used to maintain human control over wildlife populations.

“Sustainability” as a fig leaf

Official statements claim that recreational hunting is an “active contribution to nature conservation.” This rhetoric is convenient and misleading. A hunting practice that kills thousands of wild animals annually, including mothers and calves, while simultaneously eliminating natural regulators like wolves, can hardly be considered sustainable.

Sustainability means nature’s self-regulation, not constant human intervention. As long as hunting quotas are based on outdated forestry dogmas, recreational hunting remains an instrument of power, not of natural ecological balance.

Time for a real forest-wildlife policy

Nature doesn’t need special hunts; it needs peace, space, and respect. Instead of killing thousands of animals “according to plan” every year, it’s time to…

• to recognize natural regulators such as the wolf,
• To consistently protect habitats
• and no longer align hunting policy with traditional or economic interests.

As long as the Office for Hunting and Nonsense proudly presents its figures as a success, the most important question remains unanswered: When will the killing finally stop and when will the understanding of nature begin?

• Protective forest: Hobby hunting creates problems it claims to solve
• The wolf is not the problem – he is the solution
• Forest conversion: Paths to resilient mixed forests in the face of hunting
• Forest conversion at Lukmanierpass
• Hunting is not the solution for forest conversion
• Hobby hunters do not help forest conversion
• The conflict between forestry, hunting, and wildlife

If we give up now, there’ll be no stopping the timber industry and federal bureaucrats from attacks on forest owls and old-growth forests

By Wayne Pacelle

Senate Democrats recently voted not only to kill a half a million North American barred owls, but also to give Trump’s Department of the Interior the green light to start taking down old-growth forests in California, Oregon, and Washington — and to kill threatened spotted owls in the process.

A ghastly plan that its proponents originally described as resolving competition between barred and spotted owls has now been weaponized to kill them both.

Make no mistake, if the federal government starts killing barred owls, that activity will go hand-in-hand with cutting down the trees that spotted owls need to survive. They’ll kill the spotted owls as collateral damage and they’ll give the timber industry the permits it wants to increase the haul of public-lands timber by 60%.

Sadly, Democratic senators focused their voting decision on partisanship and process instead of sound and humane policy, and they handed the timber industry a tool to begin cutting ancient forests and shooting and otherwise hurting both species of forest owls.

Starting a decade ago, the timber industry paid for the initial studies to try to document that barred owls and spotted owls compete. It was a deflection, attempting to blame barred owls for the long-term decline of spotted owls rather than to accept that industry’s decades-long clearing of old-growth forests.

Democratic politicians bought the lie that barred owls are “invasive,” when any serious-minded scientist understands that barred owls live only in North America and they’ve engaged in a modest range expansion. If barred owls are invasive, so are bald eagles, red-shouldered hawks, blue jays, Anna’s hummingbirds, and hundreds of other bird species that live only in North America.

We change landscapes, forests, grasslands, and the Earth’s temperature and precipitation patterns and expect animals not to adapt? We destroy their homes and ask them not to fly and find a safe place to live?

Talk about blaming the victim.

The Barred Owl Massacre Compounds Problems for Spotted Owls

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., stood on the Senate floor last week with photos of owls and their young and rightly called this scheme what it is: absurd. He reminded his colleagues that the barred owl’s expansion into the West is a natural and adaptive behavior, not a capital crime. His plea was simple: let nature be nature. Spare both owl species.

Nearly half of Senate Republicans voted in favor of Sen. Kennedy’s resolution, S.J. Res. 69. But only three Democrats — Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — joined him in defending these beautiful birds from this calculated government-run assault. The rest voted to allow government-paid shooters to enter our national parks and forests to kill monogamous owl pairs by the hundreds of thousands, orphaning countless owlets too young to survive without parental care.

What’s worse, the ill-considered plan, supported by the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity and their newfound allies in the timber industry, is doomed to fail. We have amassed a growing list of highly credentialed scientists who say that very thing.

• Dr. Elaine Leslie, former chief of Biological Services for the National Park Service and a leader with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks: “Barred owl reproduction and juvenile dispersal will negate any short-term reduction in lethal take … Recolonization will occur rapidly.”
• Dr. Eric Forsman, dean of forest owl biologists who worked at the U.S. Forest Service for decades: “As soon as you stop, barred owls will be back, and you will be back to square one.”
• Kent Livezey, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, author of 14 peer-reviewed papers on barred and spotted owls: “I do not believe that spending more than 1 billion dollars to kill almost one-half million barred owls is worth the carnage, expense, precedents, and distraction from what is the more-important issue: protection of biodiverse old-growth forests.”

As Livezey says, the price tag is immense: potentially $1.35 billion or more over 30 years. Imagine spending that money to protect habitat instead of destroying the birds who inhabit it.

We at Animal Wellness Action and our swelling coalition of more than 450 organizations, including dozens of local Audubon chapters, are not standing down. We are already in federal court challenging this plan. And we are asking Congress, if they didn’t like the Congressional Review Act resolution, to put a pause on the kill plan by defunding it for the next fiscal year and look at the science. Assess the views of scientists who don’t work for the timber industry and recognize that the plan is doomed to fail.

And pausing the plan also stops the timber industry from colluding with the Department of the Interior to issue “take” permits for spotted owls to cut down their old-growth-forest habitats.

If barred owls will simply fly back into these forests, what’s the point of spending a billion dollars to kill them? What’s the point of pretending that slaughtering one species will somehow “save” another, when the plan is going to unleash habitat destruction and logging that will shrink the suitable living areas for both species.

We are on the front end of a foolish 30-year plan. Sen. Kennedy called it hubris, and he was right. We need your help to prosecute the case that killing half a million owls, and doing so on lands that include 14 national parks and cutting down old growth forests on other public lands amounts, is a scandal.

Go to www.animalwellnessaction.org and see how your senators voted. Use our on-line tool here to thank the lawmakers who voted to stop this madness. And go here to urge the senators who voted to kill owls and cut down old growth forests to pivot and act as protectors of owls and forests.