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Why do we know the number so precisely? Because he wrote it all down, in his well-kept records. Over the course of his life, he is known to have killed 274,899 animals. įranz Ferdinand was an avid hunter, to put it mildly. Robin Ashenden: "Mickiewicz, Bisons and Białowieża: by Mary Lussiana", Central and Eastern European London Review. The most damaging of these must have been when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided to ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and test the latest productions from his munitions factory at Styr on the wildlife, machine gunning anything that moved.

This was due in part to deforestation and in part to the hunting parties of the Tsar. Hans Werner Scheidl: "Der schießwütigste Habsburger", Die Presse, īy 1914 the stock of bison had already been depleted to around 460. On board the ship Empress Elisabeth, with whom he undertook his famous voyage around the world in 1892/93, he only regretted that he was not allowed to kill whales with the on-board cannon. Though the article did not specify the weapon used by the Archduke, it must be presumed to have been a machine gun.Īnatol Murad: "Franz Joseph I of Austria and His Empire", Ardent Media, 1968, p78. Norman Davies: "Europe: A History", Pimlico: London, 1997.Īccording to a story published in Aufbau und Friedn, a Prague newspaper, in July 1865, Archduke Franz Ferdinand once shot 2333 animals in one day's hunting. Two of his trips to Poland sufficed to bring the European bison to the point of extinction. He was an early adept of the machine-gun, and would have all the animals of the forest driven into his sights. Yet he scoured the globe for species to kill with a zeal that far exceeded the social demands of his day. Few sources stress Francis-Ferdinand’s passion for hunting.