Which game can be hunted in November? A whole lot: red deer, fallow deer, sika deer, mouflons, roe deer, wild boar, brown hares, pheasants, mallards, other game birds and predatory game. Those who hunt love autumn. On November 3rd, after the Evangelical Liturgy, however, sometimes also on another day in November, ecumenical services are held under the sign of St. Hubert, the bishop and patron of the hunters. The Hubertus celebration is a special harvest festival, according to the church. Because the Hubertus legend is associated with a “basic attitude of respect for the creature”. In the story of the Bishop of Maastricht and later Liège, the hunters found the original motive of ethical behavior towards game. The liturgy suggests quoting Psalm 104, verses ten and eleven: “You make water well up in the valleys,that they flow between the mountains, that all the animals in the field drink and the game quench their thirst. "
The term Thanksgiving is very apt.
Those who lease a territory or call forests and agricultural areas rich in game their property do not own the wild animals that live there.
They don't belong to anyone.
But owners or tenants are allowed to shoot what is free according to the hunting calendar and therefore regard the prey as harvest.
Just as the farmer tends his stable animals and celebrates his hard-earned harvest, so the hunters cherish and care for the wild animals and eat them gratefully.
We keep talking about the many tasks that they carry out.
So it is an embedding of this point of view in the Christian practice of religion.
Hubertus myth as a church offer
For both the Catholic and Protestant churches, it is not a contradiction to Christian ethics when hunters harvest game meat. This is interesting in that, for pagan religions, animal sacrifice was one of the most sacred acts in communication between gods and humans. Taking the life of an animal to express gratitude to the gods, to placate them, or to intercede was a pre-Christian custom. Hubertus was canonized because, with his legend, a delicate (deer -?) Cow could be pushed off the ice. In the Ardennes, where he worked towards the Christianization of the population towards the end of his life, Diana, the goddess of the hunt, was still worshiped. The Hubertus myth was, so to speak, the offer of the church to the hunters to convert.
On November 3, 743, the so-called "elevation" of Hubertus' bones was celebrated. Elevation has to be understood literally. Bones were removed from the open grave of the Man of God, who died in 727, and brought to the exhibition in the chancel of Liège Cathedral. In truth - and this only reinforces the theory of courtship for the worshipers of Diana - Hubertus probably had no special relationship with hunting and hunters. The legend apparently reached Hubertus in a transfer from one saint to another. Saint Eustachius, a martyr and one of the fourteen helpers in need, is said to have seen the appearance of a stag with a crucifix between its antlers, who died around 118 AD. He and his family were baptized after this revival experience.In some stories he turned away from the hunt altogether and never killed an animal again. In Austria and Bavaria in particular, Eustachius is invoked as the patron saint of hunting more often than Hubertus.