One Voice challenges the ESOD decree: Press release

Foxes, stone martens, pine martens, weasels, carrion crows, magpies, rooks, house starlings and jays. This is the list of animals classified as ESOD – ‘species likely to cause damage’. The Ministry of Ecology has just published its new decree governing these ESODs for the next three years. And it is in no way lighter.

Foxes are now classified as ESOD in three more departments than in 2023, magpies in five more, and house starlings in four more. Other species have been downgraded, but with exceptions on a town-by-town basis. All in all, the list still concerns ninety-three departments.

The State authorises the killing of martens, despite their population being in decline in France

This is the most scandalous part of the text. Pine martens remain listed in fourteen departments: Aisne, Ariège, Aube, Cantal, Cher, Corrèze, Creuse, Indre, Indre-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, Puy-de-Dôme, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Saône-et-Loire and Haute-Savoie.

These animals benefit from special European protection: their killing may only be authorised if it is demonstrated, with figures to back it up, that the species is thriving. In May 2025, the Council of State had, in fact, revoked their ESOD status due to a lack of reliable and up-to-date data. The Ministry now claims to have this data. However, there is no recognised method for counting martens in France — a report by the Ministry of Ecology’s own inspectorate stated this in no uncertain terms back in 2024. Furthermore, their biology calls for caution: they reproduce late in life, have only one litter per year and few offspring. In the United Kingdom, intensive trapping was enough to wipe out the English populations. In France, sightings over the last twenty-four years and trapping figures from the last fifteen suggest that the species is in sharp decline.

Killing these animals does not reduce the amount of damage caused

The ESOD classification is supposed to protect crops, livestock, property or public health. No study shows that it achieves this, even though several institutions have examined the usefulness of this classification.

A study by the National Museum of Natural History published in 2026 concludes that these mass culls do not reduce damage — and that they cost more than the damage they are supposed to prevent.

The CARELI study provides the most compelling evidence of this. Between April 2021 and January 2025, researchers in the Doubs department compared towns where foxes were hunted with others where hunting and trapping had been suspended. Where killing had ceased, foxes did not ‘proliferate’: their populations regulate themselves. Nor did attacks on chicken coops increase. What really protects poultry is a well-designed fence and a secure shelter.

The General Inspectorate of the Ministry of Ecology (2024) compared France with seven other countries: none had made the same choice, and its recommendation was explicit: not to renew this decree, and to keep killing as a last resort. The Ministry finally renewed it.

Who benefits from the scheme?

The ESOD classification allows animals to continue to be killed when the hunting season is closed and extends the practice of trapping. In total, around 1.7 million animals are killed each year under this scheme — amounting to nearly 5 million over the duration of a decree.

And the methods used are all more barbaric and cruel. A trap leaves the animal to struggle, sometimes for hours, if it does not kill it outright, in a device incapable of distinguishing between species. A cat, a hedgehog or a protected animal may be caught in it. Foxes also suffer the ordeal of being dug out: dogs drive them to the bottom of their burrows, a hole is dug down to them, they are extracted using long tongs and then killed with a gun or a knife. The new decree perpetuates these practices.

For hunting federations and trappers’ associations, this is a matter of recreation behind their so-called civic act of ‘culling’. Indeed, it is these very same parties who fuel the system: the damage justifying the classification is reported by the parties concerned, then compiled by their federations, without any independent scrutiny or scientific expertise. A system that relies on the word of those who benefit from it cannot be considered objective.

Yet these animals provide services that are often overlooked: foxes consume thousands of rodents a year, and every species has its place in the food chain. Eliminating them en masse may actually exacerbate the very problems we were seeking to solve.

One Voice is lodging an appeal with the Council of State

Faced with an attacked henhouse or damaged crops, the State had a choice. It opted for guns, traps and snares, even though other solutions exist, are well-documented and offer better protection. The authorisation for the digging-out of foxes has been renewed. The continued inclusion of martens – the exact population size of which nobody knows – adds illegality to the injustice; but the problem is not that this list is poorly drawn up. It is that it exists at all. One Voice will lodge an appeal with the Council of State to have this decree annulled.

“The reports exist, the studies exist, the Council of State’s ruling exists. The Ministry has them all before it, and yet it is still signing off on a further three years of trapping and digging-out. We are not asking the State to believe us: we are asking it to demonstrate that these millions of deaths serve some purpose. It will not, because it cannot. We will fight to ensure that no animal is ever again considered a pest.”, says Muriel Arnal, President of One Voice.

One Voice challenges the ESOD decree: Press release

Foxes, martens, corvids… One Voice challenges the decree that condemns millions of animals regarded as pests