Badger digging: One Voice launches a legal attack

Spring 2023 promises to be particularly dreadful for female badgers and their families. Dozens of prefectural decrees are in the process of being passed, everywhere in France, tosubject them to the hell of underground hunting with hounds right in the middle of the reproduction period. The warnings that we issue as part of the numerous public consultation proceedings and decisions by administrative tribunals in our favour mean nothing: prefectures, hand in hand with hunters, continue their campaign to authorise this type of hunting despite its illegality.

In the face of widespread aggression against badgers by the State and by hunters...

This huge attack has a goal: badgers, including their young, are wrongly accused of all evils to satisfy the morbid passions of diggers.

Like all decrees passed on the subject of hunting, they are subject to public participation procedures. And, in most departments, they are biased: the prefects do not communicate any data on the number of badgers living in the department or any figures on the number of individuals killed by hunters each year.

Yet, digging out in the spring threatens the very existence of these individuals in our countryside. There is a solid scientific consensus on the fact that the young are present in the setts during this period of the year and that killing them is detrimental to the balance of the species. But, preferring to rely on studies led by hunters themselves, the prefects ignore the scientific data and de facto authorise hunters to kill the young, in clear violation of the Environmental Code.

Not to mention animals from protected species such as bats, otters, or even wild cats, who sometimes also live in the burrows of these social architects.

...a pedagogical and legal counter-offensive by One Voice for these animals

Following our investigation revealing the horrors of digging out, we have supported the petition to obtain a ban on this practice on the Senate’s site. But the resulting report ‘revealed’ once again (as we suspected...) that our political representatives will not act without huge mobilisation from everyone. After the success of the first International Day for Badgers, One Voice and its partners are rallying again this year. On 15 May, we are organising numerous actions to raise awareness to rehabilitate these wrongly singled out and martyred animals, and to demand, once again, a pure and simple ban on underground hunting with hounds.

On the legal front, we will systematically attack any decree opening an additional digging out period in the spring. The decrees have already been passed: in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, we have filed an appeal as part of a united front with our partners (FNE Aura, LPO, ASPAS, and AVES).
In the departments of Manche, Oise, Orne, Charente-Maritime and even Haute-Vienne, we have urgently referred to the administrative tribunals to obtain a suspension on these decrees: urgent hearings have thus already been set on 3 May at 2:30pm in Toulouse (in the context of a joint referral with FNE 82, ASPAS, and Aves France, at which the Géo Avocats law firm will represent us) and at 3:30pm in Limoges on the same day, as well as on 9 May at 3:30pm in Poitiers, at 1:30 in Caen, and at 2pm in Amiens

To win this fight, we need you! Join us on the weekend before 15 May, throughout France, and sign the petition specifically demanding a protected species status for badgers!

Translated from the French by Joely Justice