300 lives saved. In the Finistère department, badgers will spend the summer of 2024 in peace!
In the Finistère department, the diggers were ready for action: on May 15, the prefect authorized them to kill badgers in their own burrows. But that was without our action: together with the Ligue pour la protection des oiseaux (LPO) Bretagne, we urgently appealed against this decision, and the Rennes administrative court has just ruled in our favor! A first victory against the supplementary underground hunting period for 2024, which will save almost 300 lives.
Photo : Nicolas Bazerque
A massacre narrowly avoided
Every year in the Finistère department, hundreds of badgers are cornered by dogs, hunted down by diggers, then pulled out of the ground by metal pliers, before being executed with knives or guns. And the prefecture itself has admitted: of these 300 individuals, almost 20% are youngsters, even though the law forbids the killing of young badgers!
As usual, the State blames them for everything. So-called damage to crops, to road infrastructures, it tries everything and there’s never a shred of evidence on the horizon, with the exception of a few purely declarative “damage reports”, each more fanciful than the last. And with good reason: they are not subject to any controls! All this did not fool the interim relief judge, who suspended the decree even before the hunting season opened.
The first of many hearings to come
After a historic year in 2023 in the fight against underground venery, with the rescue of almost 4,000 badgers, the long-distance race continues in 2024. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be attacking dozens of decrees authorizing this cruel practice: from Nantes to Toulouse, via Rouen and Orléans, everywhere, we’ll be defending badgers’ right to live without fear of being put to death in the name of a small group of people’s hobby.
Support us in this fight! We look forward to seeing many of you on May 15 for World Badger Day and beyond, as part of our nationally coordinated action. And in the meantime, if, like more than 8 out of 10 French people, you are opposed to this deadly practice (IPSOS/One Voice poll, October 2023), sign and share our petition for the abolition of underground venery and the protection of badgers.