Animals still under fire in Gard. One Voice is appealing to the Nîmes Administrative Tribunal; the hearing is set for 3 May
Foxes, badgers, wild boars, deer, roe deer, and fallow deer are targeted by the Gard Prefecture. One Voice is fighting the decree of 21 February 2022. The hearing is on 3 May.
Foxes and badgers as well as animals such as wild boars, deer, roe deer, and fallow deer are targeted by the Gard Prefecture. On 21 February, the Prefect ordered the Wolfcatcher Royals in particular and other sworn officers to kill or capture them. Foxes are targeted indefinitely; other animals will be from 24 February to 11 September 2022, so for a six-month duration, in a period when hunting them is supposed to be banned. One Voice is therefore fighting against this decree that gives free rein to hunters and the like. A plea and an emergency interim suspension have been filed against this bureaucratic hunt; without it, blood will flow in the Gard scrubland. The hearing will take place at the Administrative Tribunal on 3 May at 2pm.
Edit from 14 May 2022:
On 9 May 2022, the urgent applications judge rejected our request to suspend the decree. We are now waiting for the date of the hearing for the annulment appeal that we have also filed.
The reasons put forward to justify killing animals by the Gard Prefect are always the same: traffic accidents and property damage for some, and potential diseases transmissible to humans for foxes.
Foxes, pests: really?
But we have known for a long time and thanks mainly to official reports that foxes are not more dangerous than dogs that are used to life in the great outdoors. When it comes to alveolar echinococcosis, prevention campaigns can avoid contamination without issue (you must not eat fruits that could have been infected by fox excrement and therefore pick them from up high). When it comes to Lyme disease, the presence of foxes is, on the contrary, a benefit: when they are present in an area, they avoid the spread of this disease by attacking the hosts of ticks: voles. They are also, at the same time, at the root of a decrease in the use of pesticides on crops. Red foxes suffer from an unjustified bad reputation which sticks to them and results in more than half a million deaths each year in France (see our 2017 report).
Hunters have an insatiable appetite for spilt blood
Animals considered as game, such as badgers, mercilessly dug out (as are foxes), wild boars, deer, roe and fallow deer, hunted in the autumn and winter every year, are only left in peace for the breeding season and the upbringing of their young.
Hunters cannot, under the pretext of wanting to carry out their bloody hobby all year round, dictate what they want to the prefectures under false pretences! Saying that animals are a traffic hazard or cause damage is nothing more or less than a refusal to admit that these are man-made roads that cross through their forests, and it is not the animals that are crossing our roads… Or that the farmers cannot bear a badger’s family sett, used by other animal species too, and that badgers are therefore a source of wealth for ecosystems. Instead of this, ‘damage’ is stated, often without figures to back it up, and the authorisation to get the guns out is established. As if the only solution to our small discomforts is always to kill.
A prefectural decree that we are contesting for many reasons
These animals, targeted by this decree of 21 February 2022, are victims of a wrongful trial.
This decree must be suspended as a matter of urgency; if not, thousands of animals will perish (the authorised number is unlimited)! The Wolfcatcher Royals, sworn agents of the French Office of Biodiversity (Office français de la biodiversité – OFB) and of the Departmental Federation of Hunters in Gard can, by the way, enlist the services of whomever they want, from a lambda hunter, for example.
Additionally, for years, the same arrangements have been renewed for a duration of six months, so that the ‘demolition’ is carried out throughout the whole year. It is therefore no longer about an exceptional measure arranged in order to respond to a localised problem in time and space (which is authorised by the Environmental Code), but about a true transfer of power given, for years and throughout the whole year, in the whole department to those concerned.
The massacre has already begun. There is therefore an urgency, especially as the public has not been consulted. The hearing will take place at the Nîmes Administrative Tribunal on 3 May.
Translated from the French by Joely Justice