Anna is a hunter. She’s 27 and began hunting 5 years ago, with the intent to source the food for her family herself. It is never an easy thing to pull the trigger, she says. You are always aware that you are about to take a living beings life. At the same time she finds that if you do kill animals for their meat, this is the most respectful way to do it, as they have lived an existence in freedom and with dignity.

Hunting in Germany is usually not a job, but a hobby. People have normal occupations at the side, and go hunting in their spare time. Anna is currently doing her masters degree in organic agriculture. She is also training hunting students and gives shooting lessons.

Anna tells me that the very majority of hunters she knows are people who enjoy nature, who love and respect animals deeply. She has met only very few people where she’s gotten the feeling that they do it because it feeds their ego - because they like to kill. In itself hunting is a very time intensive job full of responsibilies. And the highest pritority remains to treat the animals respectfully and grant them the cleanest death possible.

Hunting isn’t exactly a lucrative business either - it usually costs. As a hunter you are responsible for your hunting grounds, so if game nibble at a farmers cabbage at night, the hunters will be held responsible and will have to cover the costs.

Anna isn’t the only female hunter in her team. Apparently an increasing number of young women choose to train as hunters - and thus expand in a field that had so far been widely dominated by men.

One change Anna would really like to see is for hunters, farmers and foresters to work more closely together. Only when there’s discourse and exchange, she says, can there be a working ecosystem that is in balance and provides us humans with the best natural resources.