German women prowl forests

Berlin – Stifled by the city and suspicious of supermarket fare, growing numbers of German women are taking up shooting to reconnect with nature and put fresh meat on the table.

There has been a tenfold rise in the number of women who have been issued with licences to shoot game over the past 15 years, to 35,000, according to the German Hunting Association. While male recruits tend to come from rural areas, the typical female is 35 and lives in the town or city, it said.

One in five licence applicants are female, encouraged by a range of new magazines about a back-tonature lifestyle that draws on a romantic German attachment to the forest.

‘‘When I am hunting I feel very much connected to nature,’’ said Johanna Hofman, 31, one of the new breed of sportswomen who prowl the Brandenburg woods north of her home in Berlin. ‘‘I am involved in the natural cycle; it is a very elemental feeling of being connected.’’

On her weekly shooting trips she sports pearl earrings, a nose piercing and nail varnish as well as a 3.5kg rifle for shooting wild boar and deer.

Hofman first became involved in the sport while studying forestry and training her German shorthaired pointer, Anka. She also has a shotgun to kill wildfowl.

Hofman guts her quarry, takes it to be weighed and registered at the forestry office, pays for the meat and then takes it home. Christmas dinner was a deer she shot and prepared herself. Critics call her a killer, but she said: ‘‘I do not like to eat meat from a supermarket which has probably been transported from far away, having felt far more fear.’’

Hofman said said that there were differences in the way men and women approached shooting. Men were more interested in trophies and tended to be knowledgeable about the guns.