The French are renowned as enthusiastic hunters. The country even has a political party called Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition. But, as John Laurenson reports, each new generation has a greater aversion to harming animals, reports the BBC.
In a wood near the village of Hanches, 50 miles west of Paris, it's so quiet you can hear the rain dripping off the trees.
"I like to hear all the noise in the forest. I think I am like an animal, like a prehistoric man. It's in my nature," whispers Mathieu Andro, a 38-year-old agronomy researcher with a rifle.
Strung along this forest path are seven other hunters. And soon we start to hear the strange yelps of six more who, with a couple of dogs, are beating their way towards the line.
There's a scuffling in the bushes and a deer darts out of the wood, stands there for a moment and bounds on.
Andro swears, fumbles for his hunting horn, gives the two-blast signal for a roe and swears again.
Even if he'd had time to get a shot in, the angle was too risky, he explains. If he'd taken a shot, he might have hit the next hunter in the line. But still it's annoying.
He had already missed a stag the previous week. It was a pretty amazing experience though, he says, tracking it for three hours. "I was so close I could smell him."
Mathieu Andro is one of the approximately one million hunters (1,246,000 according to the French Hunting Federation, 960,000 according to anti-hunting pressure groups) that make France the biggest hunting country in Europe.
But every year for as long as anyone can remember the number gets smaller. Thirty years ago there were roughly twice as many.
This is partly due to the decline of animals to hunt.
"I've been hunting since I was 16. I'm 64 now. I can remember when there were 120 of us. Now we're 28," says Bernard Poirier, president of the Hanches hunters' association.
"It's because of intensive farming," he says.