I’ve been fortunate enough to hunt wild boar in quite a few different countries, but each one has something special about it. Where would be your favourite place to shoot wild boar? For driven boar we now have shooting cinemas, which has changed the way we can train. It’s very similar in the world of driven bird shooting, where Guns spend more time at a shooting range practising on clays. People are taking it much more seriously and spending much more time training – be they hunters or dog handlers. It’s the way the days are organised, the equipment, the training people do before going shooting, the tracking dogs, how the game is treated after it has been shot. A whole industry has been created around it, but it’s not just that. I’d say in the last 25 years, with the expansion of wild boar numbers across Europe, the need for agricultural control has increased in line with this, exposing more hunters to this form of population control than ever before. What has changed since you started shooting wild boar? I want to know that I can kill something cleanly, not just hit it. The probability of a clean kill should be extremely high, otherwise you don’t take the shot. You either know you can hit it or you don’t take the shot.” He was very strict about that – I was taught never to take chances when shooting at live quarry. He stopped me and said: “Franz, we don’t try. 22, my father set out targets at a long distance and asked me if I thought I could hit them. He didn’t pretend that he didn’t miss, or that things didn’t go wrong sometimes, it’s just that I never witnessed it.
What was amazing was that after that, for many years, I never saw him miss, and he killed things cleanly every time I was watching. My father got a right-and-left with my grandfather’s 8x57 double Holland & Holland. But in the afternoon, I joined both my parents on the stand. I must have been about six and I was annoyed that I hadn’t been allowed to join the hunt in the morning because I had school. I remember the first time I saw him shoot driven wild boar. I spent a lot of time with him in the stand, watching and learning. During this period he also held a number of German and European titles. An accomplished Shot himself, he nearly made the Olympic trap team in 1972. My father taught me, starting before I ever picked up a gun. I shot my first boar on a driven hunt when I was on a stand with both parents, and with no warning my father handed me his rifle. I was getting to know and understand the species for the first few years. I soon developed an interest for moving targets with a rifle. I can – I started shooting as soon as I could, and from an early age my father took me to shooting ranges for shotgun and rifle. Can you remember the first boar you ever shot? In this exclusive interview we look at the similarities and differences between driven bird shooting and driven boar shooting, and Franz not only talks about how he started shooting, but also gives his advice on technique and shares 10 top tips. Franz-Albrecht zu Oettingen-Spielberg is something of a legend in the driven boar hunting world, thanks to his incredible reactions, skill at spotting and identifying animals, and marksmanship that produces clean kills time and time again.