Unpublished investigation: deer farming and culling in France. No respite for wild animals

As everyone in France knows, deer are wild animals who live freely (but not peacefully) in the country’s forests. Hunters take great pleasure in killing them, claiming that “managing” them is to blame. We know less about the breeding of wild animals. Some sell “their” animals to hunting societies who release them and restore their reputation in the eyes naïve people by giving the impression that they are managing wildlife and nature. This is the case for pheasant and partridge breeding for example, an ordeal which we have exposed. Others are often also owners of closed parks, which we have shown in our investigation on penned hunting, and make a fortune out of this organised cruelty. But breeding farms can also sell their animals to the agri-food industry for them to end up on our fellow citizens’ end of year celebration tables.

How many of these kinds of breeding farms exist in our country? With these never-before-seen images, the terrible fate of these animals who are hardly protected at all can be seen.

Wild animal breeding farms: another scandal in the hunting world and for agri-food in France

Wild animals, with as much freedom as a prisoner, have little to no rights at all in France! Because abuse suffered by free wild animals is not a crime (this mutilated fox is a compelling example). They can therefore be subjected to anything since everything is an exception or dispensation. But they are the same animals; their nature does not change. Our investigation reveals the unfathomable legislative neglect that animals that are considered to be game are subject to, therefore including those that are born in a breeding farm and are not destined to be hunted.

Deer are anything but happy at the Apicerf breeding farm…

At Apicerf nothing goes to waste. The breeder also sells young stag’s antlers at market which are from the young deer slaughtered at scarcely eighteen months of age. And, whether the farming is extreme or not, no one can say that dying at a year and a half having never been free is decent life worth living!

Death is the only way out

They are sent to the Grand Autunois Morvan abattoir in the middle of the night and put to death not even on a production line but directly in the truck. Once it is parked at the entrance of the abattoir, packed one next to the other, they try to get away from the herder who enters the space where they are confined. Armed with a captive bolt pistol, which he reloads between each animal, he makes humiliating and absurd remarks about his victims who collapse on top of each other. The last one vainly attempts a U-turn but his hooves stumble over the bodies and, cornered, he ends up just the same as his companions. “That one there gave me a funny look” “Yes!”… for every blow dealt, one falls. It is visible and audible what is going on inside the truck from the outside.

Like any intoxication the process is not accurate, and many wake up in complete agony or are suffocated or crushed under bodies. And the abattoir staff leave them piled up there in the back of the truck, which is an eternity for those who are dying, before dragging some along the ground, leaving a bloody trail behind, and hanging others on hooks to carry them inside…

We are requesting that this abattoir is closed as a matter of urgency or alternatively that they stop slaughtering deer because this is clearly not acceptable! We have filed a complaint for acts of cruelty and mistreatment committed particularly by an owner, as well as other sanitation offences. Sign our petition to close these wild animal breeding farms!

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

We also need you in order to continue our investigations and lift the veil on the extent of this suffering. Many other operations of the same kind are rife. We must investigate. Support our action so that wild animals are finally protected in our country.