After last year's elk hunt, when approximately 50,000 elks were shot, there were around 200,000 elks in Sweden, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and SLU in a report.
This is a historically low level, but the decline of recent years appears to have leveled out.
The elk population was slightly larger at the end of the 2023 hunt than after the 2022 hunt.
"This is an effect of the hunters reducing the shooting significantly over the past two years; the shooting is almost halved compared to ten years ago," they write in the report.
Prior to last year's elk hunt, the population had decreased by 23.1 percent compared to the start of the hunt in 2015. The largest decline is in Gävleborg County, where the number has decreased by 42 percent.
