Safety in hunting: One Voice reports on an umpteenth smokescreen

From the elusive to Canada Dry...

At the end of October 2022, Bérangère Couillard, the Secretary of State in charge of Ecology and therefore the hunting file, implemented a consultation - what made this necessary..? Because these announcements about hunting management are elusive… We thought that there would be a bill after the efficacy of the petition filed on the Senate’s site by the One Day A Hunter [Un Jour Un Chasseur] collective, then from our hearing at the Senators’ mandate… But no, still no immediate decisions.

On Monday, the Minister announced the result of this consultation. It involved, among other things, limiting hunters’ blood alcohol levels, a minimum measure which French people were gobsmacked by in the autumn when no restrictions had so far been imposed in this plan for people who were nevertheless armed in the countryside. A request that One Voice has been bringing up for many years, just like annual eye check-ups…

Another of the measures expected by more than four in five French people to make hunting in France safe (a stable proportion for five years: see the three rounds of the IPSOS/One Voice survey in 2018, 2021, and 2022), is a hunting ban during the whole of the school holidays as well as for two days a week including Sundays.
Instead of this, the government is delivering a gadget, an application called ‘Suricate’ (they will tell us that just this once it is not a freephone number) which, if it did not concern the lives and deaths of others, would be laughable.

A hunting and gunmakers’ lobby that is stronger than safety and biodiversity

The lack of any political desire to change anything is such a pity. The accumulated deaths of animals and humans still do not measure up to a lobby for which we wonder how they still manage to dictate their own laws when they represent such a small minority. Country people as well as city-dwellers are more than fed up!

What can we still expect from a government that is not even capable of listening to the population? To keep them safe?
Horse and hound hunting is still happening, as well as underground hunting with hounds, penned hunting, and wild boar breeding farms, or deer being released to be killed. The French President even lowered the price of hunting licences by half during his first mandate! And the Ministry has opposed us so many times at the State Council to keep and justify the massacring of birds with cruel glue hunting traps and other traditional hunting methods...

If the great advances for biodiversity in general and animals in particular come down to plastic fast-food packaging and an app, we are far from the hopes raised by the ‘Make our planet great again’ from the beginning of Macron I.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice