The hunting season is to open across most of France between September 13th and 20th, when the sound of shotgun blasts will resonate across the countryside as around 1.3 million permit-holders roam public and private land in search of a kill.
Hunting in France is mostly an affair of men (women represent barely more than 2% of registered hunters) on foot – horseback hunting with hounds is a minority practice – whose prey typically includes wild boar, deer, hares and a range of more than 60 types of birds.
The return of the hunting season – which will last until February 28th – is set against a heightening disapproval of the activity, according to opinion polls, among the general public, , in correlation with increased concern about environmental issues, as well as militant opposition by conservationists and animal welfare associations.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Opinion surveys have also found that one of the major reasons for public disapproval of hunting is concern over the dangerous nature of the activity; according to the French national office for biodiversity, the OFB, during the 2019-2020 hunting season, 141 people were wounded in shooting accidents, 11 of whom died. The toll was up on that of the 2018-2019 season, when 132 people accidentally shot, of which 22 were not hunters, and seven of the victims – including one who was not a hunter – died from their wounds.
There exists an unflattering image, especially among urban populations, of hunters in France as heavy-drinking, over-armed men clothed in military-style camouflage gear, as depicted in a popular 1991 video sketch by the comic trio Les Inconnus, (in French, here).
The hunting lobby has traditionally been a powerful one, wielding political clout in rural areas. It even created a political party in 1989 – called Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions (hunting, fishing, nature and traditions, now renamed Le Movement de la Ruralité (the movement of rurality) – which is allied to the conservative Les Républicains party.
This season opens with running high among hunters and their opponents following a warning issued by the European Commission on July 2nd which has forced action to limit certain practices in the hunting of birds. In a list of so-called “infringement decisions” – which details legal action the Commission will take against European Union (EU) member states which flout EU law, ranging from restrictions on coffee imports to non-application of an anti-money laundering directive – France is singled out for continuing to allow outlawed hunting of certain species of wild birds, and also some of the methods used to capture songbirds.
The Commission, the EU’s executive branch, has given the French government until October 2nd to bring its laws into line with the EU directive on the matter, failing which it may be sent for before the EU’s Court of Justice. The Commission noted that “in France, among the 64 species [of birds] that can be hunted, only 20 are in good conservation status,” adding: “France has authorised several methods for the capture of birds, such as glue for thrushes, nets and traps for skylark and pigeons, which are not selective and are forbidden by the Directive.”
EU requirements for the protection of wild birds is detailed in a 2009 directive which allows for some national derogations. As a result, the French environment ministry issues yearly quotas for the hunting of certain bird species, but the Commission noted in July that the “strict conditions” for the derogations were “are not fulfilled” in France. The fate of birds like the common curlew, the Eurasian skylark, the mistle thrush and the golden plover is a regular conflict between hunters and conservationists.
But the Commission’s demands on France also include putting an end by October 2nd to the practice of trapping songbirds with a gluey substance coated on branches placed in trees. When they alight on the branches, the birds become stuck by their feet. The captured birds, mostly mistle thrush and blackbirds, are roughly freed and then placed in cages to attract others by their loud presence, which hunters then shoot at. The captured birds, officially numbering around 40,000, are supposedly released at the end of the hunting season, but there is little verification of that.
Failure to ban the practice, which is allowed in five départements (administrative areas equivalent to counties) in south-east France, would expose France to penalties handed down by the European Court of Justice and which could include fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros. Last Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron finally announced the issuing of a decree prohibiting the glue traps for the coming season only.
The sordid practice was demonstrated in a video (in French, immediately below), produced by the French 'League for the protection of birds', the LPO.
The move to ban the glue traps was met with an angry response from the powerful French hunters’ federation, the Fédération nationale des chasseurs (FNC). In a statement released soon after the decision, its president, Willy Schraen said the glue-trap practice had been “sacrificed in the name of a ‘Green’ political display, without a real basis for those who truly look after biodiversity within the regions, as we do on a daily basis!”
The ban on glue traps came as a surprise for the hunters. On August 7th, advisors to Prime Minister Jean Castex met with a delegation of them, which was a snub for environment minister Barbara Pompili who, in early July had refused to issue a decree authorising continuation of the practice. A few days after the meeting at the prime minister’s office came the publication of a book by Willy Schraen promoting the hunters’ cause, and which was prefaced by the newly appointed French justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti.
On August 10th, seemingly flushed by the apparent support from on high, Schraen gave an interview to France Inter public radio in which he declared: “If there is anyone who can talk about ecology, biodiversity, climatology, it’s us. We’re not the only ones, but to forget us is a mistake.” On the subject of the glue traps, Schraen insisted it was not a deadly practice. “There are 700 million mistle thrush and blackbirds in Europe, this [form of hunt] hunt takes around 30,000. The birds are captured, they are used as callers [of other birds], and they are released at the end of the season. There remains a handful of people in the [south-east] PACA region who do that, in what way does that bother Europe and our environment minister?”
“Let’s stop annoying the French, stop annoying rural people. Leave people in peace. They have this passion, they are happy people. When it has no impact on others, who does it bother?”
The claim that hunting is an ecological activity is a recurrent argument of Schraen’s since he became president of the hunters’ federation in 2016. “Of course, it appears very paradoxical,” FNC director Nicolas Rivet told Mediapart. “But hunters are present everywhere across the regions, where they are involved in carrying out many activities in favour of biodiversity.” The activities he referred to are listed on the FNC website, including the upkeep of wet zones, updating inventories of species present locally, and the numbers of migratory birds, all of which is described as contributing to “sustainable” hunting. The semantics are honed: animals are not killed, instead they are “taken”, and in place of the predatory nature of hunting, it is described as an activity of “regulation” of the wild fauna, while hunting represents the “values of rurality”.
The short videos that can be found on the website present the cynegetic world in a humoristic fashion, and notably give women centre stage. There is no talk of weapons and killed animals, rather conviviality, and the open air and countryside.
However much the hunting lobby lays claim to championing biodiversity and the love of nature, the statistics tell a different story. Under the authorisation of an EU directive of 2009, 66 species of birds can be hunted, out of which national governments set their own limitations to this. France allows the most – 63 species in 2018, representing 95% of the total, compared with 79% in Italy, and 67% in Germany. France is also the country where what International Union for Conservation of Nature, a Swiss-based NGO, considers to be threatened species are most hunted. While no other country authorises more than ten of these to be hunted, France allows hunting of 18. “For the moment, we are not acting outside the law, these hunts are legal,” said the FNC’s Rivet. “We’ll wait to see what the [European] Court says in October.”
Meanwhile, Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, the veteran and militant president of the French bird protection league, the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO), decried “the thousands of tonnes of lead poured every year into the wilds” and the “20 million animals reared in more than dubious conditions to be let out in front of guns”.
Reliable estimates of the amount of lead left scattered across the French countryside from spent hunting ammunition are scarce but, in a parliamentary reply on the subject last year, the French environment minister referred to a 2001 report by the Senate which estimated the figure at 6,000 tonnes. Lead contamination can sink into groundwater especially in marshlands), poison the local fauna (it has even been found in cattle), and most notably affects wild birds, as detailed in a report by the EU’s European Chemicals Agency.
Political favour for an influential hunting lobby
Horse-mounted hunts with hounds, the practice of sending dogs into the burrows of foxes and badgers, and the use of mechanical traps are all also difficult to be imagined as playing a conservationist role.
The “regulating” role of hunting is also questioned by the significant rise in the numbers of boar in France, which it supposedly contains with the killing of around 750,000 of the animals in each of the past two hunting seasons. Farmers and ecologists alike have criticised the perverse effects of the practice by some hunters of leaving food for boars at specific locations which is supposed to keep them away from agricultural land.
The French national office for biodiversity, the OFB, a body that comes under the auspices of both the environment and agriculture ministries, adopts a very neutral stance on hunting issues. Hunters’ representatives sit on its management board, alongside those of farmers and conservationist associations. “How can one not work with hunters, who are more than a million people who spend time in the countryside, where many of them own land?” asked OFB director general Loïc Obled. “We are a state body and have no bias. For us, it is a question of mobilising knowledge to advance the cause of biodiversity and, within that framework, we can collect information with hunters.”
While the OFB works in collaboration with the French oceanographic agency Ifremer and the national scientific research body, the CNRS, it has no such ties with an association called the Institut scientifique Nord-Est atlantique (the North-East Atlantic Scientific Institute), or ISNEA, created in 2012 by several local branches of the hunters’ federation, and which presents its vocation to be the “leading of innovating scientific studies of European wild fauna”. In reality, the association, which is aimed at reinforcing the credibility of the conservation-friendly image of itself promoted by the hunting lobby, provides very little data of a scientific kind. But its website does give a lot of information on migratory birds and their paths.
However questionable that projected image of hunters as concerned environmentalists may be, they have found an attentive ear on high. Beginning in the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, and the upper house, the Senate, where different commissions that study issues connected to the pastime involve, respectively, 115 MPs and 71 senators. Importantly, the number of permit-holding registered hunters, grouped across about 70,000 different associations, establish it as the third most popular leisure activity, behind the numbers of members of amateur football clubs and those with fishing permits.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
But they also have the ear of President Emmanuel Macron who, in August 2018, halved the cost of renewing national hunting permits from 400 euros to 200 euros. It was shortly after that decision that the campaigning environmentalist Nicolas Hulot resigned that same month from his post as environment minister.
Allain Bougrain-Dubourg claimed his bird protection association made more progress with former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a keen hunter, than with Emmanuel Macron, who does not hunt. “Together with 13 conservationist associations, we asked for a meeting at the Élysée [Palace, the presidential office] which he never granted,” said Bougrain-Dubourg. “We’re treated with disdain whereas Willy Schraen boasts of meeting with the president twice per year and regularly having him on the phone. Since the beginning of the [presidential] term, all the ministers of the environment, Nicolas Hulot, Élisabeth Borne, François de Rugy and Barbara Pompili, have told me the very weak attentiveness of the president on the issue of hunting.”
By banning the bird glue-trap practice for this coming season, Macron has, for the first time since taking office, acted contrary to his reputation as an ally of the hunting lobby. But it appears unlikely that it will significantly damage the excellent relations the hunting world enjoys with the different authorities, a relationship carefully crafted by its lobbyist Thierry Costes, a “political advisor” for the FNC.
Meanwhile, hunting has markedly changed over recent decades in both character and popularity. While their numbers are still considerable, at around 1.3 million permit holders, they are declining. “There were 2.2 million in 1975,” said FNC director Nicolas Rivet. “Since then, there is a continual fall of 2% to 3% each year.” An estimated 36% of permit-holding hunters today are from the managerial sector or liberal professions, while only 9% are farmers. A significant number are city dwellers. French hunters spend an average yearly 2,200 euros on their pastime, which for more than a third is practiced in private hunts.
As for the continuing shocking toll of accidental shootings of people, the FNC says it has made a priority of addressing safety issues, including discussions on the subject with ramblers’ and cyclists’ federations. “We will be the happiest possible when there will no longer be accidents,” said Rivet. “But this question of sharing the countryside allows for a reminder that it is not open and public everywhere. Seventy-five percent of forests in France are private. Hunters go about their business on private or rented terrains. At stake there is the respect of private property.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version, with some added reporting, by Graham Tearse