Adaptive hunting: threatened species under hunters’ fire. One Voice is at the State Council on 11 May for the birds.

These birds in our countryside and mountains have one thing in common: they are all on the IUCU red list of threatened species in France. Classified as vulnerable, in decline, or in danger, their population continues to decline. However, hunters, spurred on by the sole pleasure of killing them at point-blank range, continue to make fun of them. To destroy biodiversity with no shame, they champion the implementation of an adaptive management of species. An environmental aberration.

The principle is simple. Adaptive management allows them to “regularly adjust harvesting of species according to the conservation status of their population and habitat, based on scientific knowledge relating to these populations”.

Simply, this management relies on a simple feedback system. Who are they kidding?

The complexity of monitoring species

We know the method of monitoring species is extremely complex and requires ambitious ways of collecting data, putting it together, analysing it, and finally, reacting. Who will take care of this? Hunters themselves and their ‘Chassadapt’ app? This app, presented as a way of controlling specimens and improving knowledge of species, relies on hunters’ mere statements. This is just another aberration.

A system extended to non-hunted species

The adaptive management system on the 90 (!!!) hunted species in France should have been put in place by the biodiversity plan in July 2018. But insatiable hunters asked to apply it to non-hunted species. “Not only does hunting have less impact on fragile hunted species, but a species that is no longer hunted is still doomed ,” Willy Schraen, President of the Fédération nationale des chasseurs [National Federation of Hunters], assures in Connaissance de la chasse [Hunting Awareness] magazine, dated September 2018, without even blushing. Such cynicism is chilling and we uphold the opposite view: let’s stop killing animals, especially when they are already in decline.

However, adaptive management has been included in the law of 24 July 2019. And if it is supervised by a committee of scientific experts (the GEGA) who are responsible for issuing recommendations, these will not be followed by the government. The GEGA has also recommended a harvest quota of zero individuals on turtledoves and Eurasian curlews. With no effect.

Victories...

On 10 September 2020, One Voice and the LPO [League for the Protection of Birds] won their appeals filed before the State Council to get the decree authorising the massacre of turtledoves, already on the cusp of extinction, suspended. On this date, 6,368 individuals had been killed. The decree will be annulled on 30 December 2021. On 17 December 2020, the State Council ruled in the LPO’s favour, during an appeal filed against a decree allowing the hunting of 6,000 Eurasian curlews in 2019-2020. This decree had already been urgently suspended by the high court in August 2019.

Yes but...

The fight for the birds continues. We cannot let them pass this unjust law that gives full power to hunters with no regard for biodiversity. We have filed a plea before the State Council against adaptive management in hunting: the executive decree and the list of species concerned. The hearing at the State Council will take place on 11 May 2022 at 2pm.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice