Four emergency interim proceedings in Bretagne and Pays de la Loire to save western jackdaws

The Prefects in the west of the country predicted that 16,000 western jackdaws would be slaughtered in Finistère, 8000 in Côtes-d’Armor, 3000 in Morbihan and 635 in Maine-et-Loire. It is unbearable! We condemn these mass cullings and the fact that the jackdaws that are injured can be dying in atrocious pain while their orphan babies die of hunger.

Let’s not forget that the birds concerned are corvids that benefit from a status intended to protect them, contrary to their cousins, rooks and crows, considered as pests or as a species that can be classified as ‘likely to cause damage’, throughout France.

The cherry on the cake of the State’s inhumanity: not only are the authorisations to kill birds (already in bad shape, given the 6th mass extinction that is taking place right now) published in their tens by Prefectures, but these birds are coincidentally not protected! With their exemptions for western jackdaws, each Prefecture therefore in reality more or less allows their extinction! It is always the same: as soon as we must act for the planet, climate, or animals, private human interests systematically come to the fore, ruining any effort to redress the balance and any hope of change.

Cullings boost reproduction

In several areas, we have too often observed that the attackers are totally unaware of the behaviour of jackdaws!

A recent study from DREAL Bretagne (Regional Directorate for the Environment, Planning and Housing), long awaited and finally published in Spring 2022, incidentally shows that these massive annual cullings do not make it possible to reduce damage and that the fixed quotas of birds to kill are not based on any scientific justification. The study also brings up lines of thought surrounding the evolution of agricultural practices. We should add that this damage is debatable and is not necessarily a result of jackdaws...

We will stop at nothing and will start our work again as many times as necessary to defend jackdaws, crows, or ravens, who are such intelligent birds. We are therefore requesting the cancellation and urgent suspension of these four decrees authorising the massive and imminent culling of thousands of birds from a protected species. Nothing justifies these legalised killings that occur right in the middle of the nesting and rearing period of the young!

In Maine-et-Loire, the urgent applications judge has set the hearing in Nantes at 3pm on 23 May. In Morbihan, Côtes-d’Armor, and Finistère, the hearing date is grouped and finally set for 25 May at 10am at the Rennes Administrative Tribunal.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice