A chain of hearings against badger digging: Orléans and Châlons-en-Champagne on 28 March and Pau on 4 April!
Will badgers end up finding peace? Additional periods for underground hunting with hounds are in the spotlight more than ever. Although the courts are now ruling largely against this archaic practice that decimates thousands of individuals each year and adds to the already deadly hunting season, our hearings continue. On 28 March at 9:30am, the Châlons-en-Champagne administrative tribunal will study our plea on the Aube, Haute-Marne, and Ardennes prefects’ decrees for the 2023-2024 season. On the same day at 10:15am, the Orléans judges will examine the case of the 2020-2021 decree in Loiret. And on 4 April at 8:45am, the Pau tribunal will examine the Pyrénées-Atlantiques decrees for 2022-2023.
Updated 12 April 2024
Two new victories! In Loiret, the additional periods for underground badger hunting with hounds from 2020 and 2021 were in fact illegal. This is what the Orléans administrative tribunal has just confirmed once again. While many prefects prepare to authorise this cruel hunting from 15 May, we are appealing to them: respect court decisions and ban badger digging in spring and summer!
Now the badgers have been saved, we are on the road to cancelling the decrees!
In these five departments, prefects authorise digging out in spring and summer in the middle of the reproductive period. Families are terrorised: with no way to escape, the young and their parents are massacred down in the bottom of their setts. For several years, we have been systematically attacking these decisions, with or without our partners (Loiret Nature Environnement for the 2020-2021 decree in Loiret, and AVES for the 2023-2024 decrees in Aube, Haute-Marne, and Ardennes).
In spring 2023, One Voice also obtained an urgent suspension on hunting in these departments as well as in around thirty others, allowing thousands of individuals to be spared !
Let’s give badgers a voice in the face of prefects’ persecution!
Slowly but surely, the legal system is taking its course and confirming the illegality of these decisions throughout France. Recently, the Caen, Limoges, Nantes, and even Amiens tribunals definitively cancelled these decrees, recalling that underground hunting with hounds puts the badger cubs in danger.
And if prefects continue to authorise these massacres despite all of these rulings, they have been warned: we will always be there to give a voice to these true underground architects, killed in their thousands for the sole pleasure of a small number of people who are looking to keep themselves occupied outside of the hunting season.
To send a strong message to all prefects, sign our petitions to insist that badgers be protected and for a ban on underground hunting with hounds, as well as a radical reform of hunting!