2500 badgers saved... the fight continues!
Since the start of May, almost 2500 badgers have been saved thanks to One Voice’s legal action.
Each year in the spring and summer, between 12 and 15,000 badgers are hunted down into their setts by diggers, before having their throats slit or being killed at point-blank range. These are in addition to all of the badgers already slaughtered during the hunting season from September to February. To date, our legal actions have allowed almost 2500 of them to be saved from an atrocious death between May and September this year. Faced with persecution by hunters and State representatives, we are continuing our relentless fight to defend these animals who just want peace.
This year, in almost fifty departments, prefects have authorised an additional period of underground hunting with hounds. But this was without counting our action, which has allowed thousands of them to be saved.
This ‘hobby’ is practiced as follows: hunters block up the exits, sending their dogs into the setts for hours to corner the badger cubs and their parents at the bottom, then they dig. The hunt lasts hours, the dogs here are considered as tools, exploited at will, sent down into the earth again and again, and sometimes seriously injured. By the end, trenches leave the forest ripped open, tunnels end up entirely destroyed, badgers (or any living animal that is potentially in the sett, possibly belonging to protected species which are illegal to hunt) are then dragged out and slaughtered.
All of this for the hobby of a handful of individuals who only have this to do outside of the so-called ‘hunting season’ being open and when digging the earth is much harder when the earth is icy.
Badgers: victims of unbearable persecution
With one or two young per year per couple and a long time before the young are self-sufficient, the species reproduces very slowly. This does not stop hunters from decimating entire families and destroying their habitat, only leaving rubbish strewn behind them on the ground, trees with severed roots, and also, the majority of the time, bodies abandoned on the premises. All of this, trying to put on an air of good standing by wrapping themselves in so-called principles such as ‘hunting ethics’… Where are they when they methodically organise these “blind hunts” (as an urgent applications judge rightly described them) to kill the young?
Prefects, via farmers and with the support of hunters, talk about crop damage but do not provide any data. They are fantasists, even. So, in Haute-Vienne, the Prefecture has accused these animals weighing barely ten kilos that are partial to berries of attacking… cows!
These excuses are worthless. It is time to put a stop to underground hunting with hounds as we have called for, as well as to permanent exemptions. Eight in ten French people are in favour of banning this cruel practice, a stable rate since 2018.
Almost 2500 badgers spared thanks to our proceedings
We have obtained a suspension on digging out from May in nine departments before seven administrative tribunals. Thanks to our action, this is almost 2500 lives that have been saved. Only the Lyon Administrative Tribunal, for the Rhône Department, thought that the number of individuals concerned did not warrant an urgent decision. Despite these suspensions, prefectures do not hesitate in passing a new decree just after the suspension that we obtained, like in Allier for example. Naturally, we will attack this new decree with our partners.
Beyond the emergency interim proceedings, we also just obtained two cancellations of older decrees, with the Orléans Administrative Tribunal having cancelled the decrees of 2021 in Indre-et-Loire and Loir-et-Cher.
In the weeks to come, two hearings have been set: in Ille-et-Vilaine on 8 June at 11am at the Rennes Administrative Tribunal, and in Meuse on 13 June at 10am at the Nancy Administrative Tribunal.
A few days ago, we filed an international complaint with our partners. Along with us, more than ever, you too can call for a ban on underground hunting with hounds and for badgers to be protected!
Translated from the French by Joely Justice