Two hunters accused of the manslaughter of a young man mistaken for a boar have stood trial in the French town of Cahors in a case that also puts the wider culture and safety of French hunting in the dock, reports The Guardian.
Morgan Keane, 25, died after he was hit in the chest while cutting wood on his own land near Calvignac in the Lot, south-west France, in December 2020. The hunter who fired the fatal shot, Julien Féral, 35, said he mistook Keane for a wild boar.
The judge, outlining how the hunt – described by investigators as “totally disorganised” and “intrinsically dangerous” – had progressed during the day, said it was “a miracle” that an accident had not happened sooner.
In a breaking voice, Féral said: “I recognise my mistake and I regret it. I have always said that. I am sincerely sorry to the family. It is engraved in my head for life. There is not a day that passes that I don’t think about it. I can only say I am sorry.”
A second man, Laurent Lapergue, 51, who was directing the hunt and is also charged with manslaughter, denied responsibility. He said he had given all the hunters present that day the security rules before they set off, a claim denied by Féral and other witnesses.
“I repeated the rules as required but not everyone always listens,” Lapergue said. The hunt was “perfectly controlled”, he added, “but perhaps not 100%”.
Féral should not have been shooting from where he was and with a high hedge in front of him, he said. “To me this was impossible. You couldn’t see more than three metres,” Lapergue told the court.
“And yet a shot was fired,” said the judge. There was silence.
Morgan Keane and his brother Rowan, 24, had lived alone at the remote property overlooking the Lot River after the deaths of their French mother in 2016 and their British father, Michael, in 2019.
Rowan Keane’s lawyer, Benoît Coussy, reduced members of the public in court to tears as he described how the bullet passed through Morgan Keane’s lungs and heart. He said the charge should have been one of murder.
“He [Morgan] spent 15 minutes dying. The autopsy report makes for hard reading. The enormous bullet pierced his lungs and heart and he drowned in his blood. That’s the reality. For 15 minutes he was crying out.”
Coussy added: “Morgan’s life ended in the forest where he went to cut wood. But the story didn’t start there but several years before when Morgan’s father politely asked hunters to go elsewhere to shoot. He was a foreigner and at the same not a hunter and the hunting world is quite ferocious. If you are not a hunter it means you are against hunting.
“Morgan and Rowan’s father asked the hunt to go further away, but they came back, bigger and better time and time again. Why didn’t they go to the valley where there are kilometres to hunt?”
The president of the court, Philippe Clarissou, said he had discovered there were no national rules for hunting in France. Security rules are established by the hunting federation at départment level and approved by local prefects, meaning different rules apply in different areas.
“Everyone says ‘we are veteran hunters’. They say ‘we know what we are doing, we know the land, we don’t need to explain the rules, we perfectly understand them.’ But when asked, nobody can explain in detail what they are,” the judge said.
Féral told the court he had only had his hunting licence for four months before the fatal shooting and it was his sixth hunt. He had taken it up to “clear his head” after his young daughter was killed by a drink-driver. “I like nature and I didn’t have any other way to destress. I thought: why not?” he said.