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Sweden

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Permits

The hunting right follows the land, the fee follows the hunter

The landowner holds the hunting right; every hunter owes the wildlife management fee.

Section 10 gives the hunting right to the owner of the property, subject to the exceptions the act provides. The hunting right includes the right to take game that is picked up, found dead, or killed otherwise than while hunting. Under an agricultural lease the tenant holds the hunting right on the leased land unless otherwise agreed. Special provisions govern the Sami hunting right. The act then places three separate charges on the hunter: the wildlife management fee (viltvårdsavgift), a fee for certain categories of game taken, and a special fee for game taken contrary to a hunting licence. Fees of the first kind feed the wildlife management fund (viltvårdsfonden). The administration keeps two separate registers: the hunting card register (jaktkortsregistret), listing those who have paid the management fee, and the hunter's exam register (jägarexamensregistret), meant to ease the handling of firearms and ammunition permit applications. On the police's request, the environmental protection agency discloses the exam parts a person has passed.

Weapons and ammunition

Only the hunting means the government prescribes

Section 30 limits hunting to the weapons and means the government prescribes, with possible type approval.

Section 30 of the Swedish act is closed: in hunting, only those weapons and other hunting means that the government prescribes may be used. The government may further require that weapons and other means be of an approved type, and provide that a fee be payable for that assessment. The drafting fits the general regime: because game is protected by default and huntable only on authority, the means of hunting it are likewise enumerated rather than left open. The detail of permitted firearms and ammunition therefore sits in government and agency rules, not in the act. The act adds a requirement that bears directly on field practice: authorisations may be made conditional on a dog being available during the hunt to track wounded game. Sweden may also make hunting from a Swedish vessel or aircraft on the high seas subject to conditions, or prohibit it, in order to meet its international commitments on the protection of game.

Regulations

Sweden: all game is protected by default

The act states that game is protected and may be hunted only where the act, or a decision made under it, allows.

The Swedish hunting act (Jaktlag 1987:259) governs wildlife management, the right to hunt and the conduct of hunting within Swedish territory and Sweden's economic zone. It defines game as wild mammals and birds, and hunting as catching or killing game and searching for, tracking or pursuing it to that end; interfering with game nests and taking or destroying birds' eggs also count as hunting. Section 3 inverts the logic a central European hunter is used to: game is protected and may be hunted only where this follows from the act or from rules or decisions issued under it. Where game is protected, that protection extends to its eggs and nests. Section 4 sets the aims of management: to conserve the game species belonging to the country's stock and the bird species that occur here naturally on a temporary basis, and to promote a development of populations that is appropriate in the light of public and private interests.