Hunting in Sologne: when birds dying is a good deal
Guns and alcohol are still a winning cocktail for hunters. The birds do not stand a chance. The owners in this domain are cashing in on it.
Last November, our investigators infiltrated a group of hunters in Sologne. At their own risk, they filmed the gunfire, the birds being thrown into a panic with tens of them falling down, then dying while being sneered at. Horrific scenes, paid for in cash. Hunting is a fruitful market. Killing birds off pays big time.
«The birds try to escape, to fly quickly and up high, but they are surrounded. Their only chance of survival is the shooting mistakes made by mediocre killers. Some fall dozens of metres mid-flight, still alive. The impact is violent: their body crashes into the ground, they struggle, their legs broken, lungs punctured. The agony is drawn out…»
one of our investigators reported, still very shaken by the scenes that he had just witnessed.
Last November, we also infiltrated a hunt in Sologne. If our images – mainly distributed discretely – reveal the barbaric nature of these practices that certain people still dare to defend in the name of tradition, they also expose what is less well known: the fruitful trafficking of hunting.
Fairground tickets for sentient beings
Our videos prove it: hunting is not a healthy walk in the fresh air, a harmony between humans, nature, and living things. Let’s stop with the clichéd ideas. To fill their knapsacks, the hunters pay the owners of the estates. They negotiate the date of the killing and the number of birds that they can shoot. Death is a trade, a money-making business.
On that day, pheasants and young partridges are released into a sky littered with bullets. They are at the meeting place. Hunters have paid. In a panic, the birds try to escape. Alas, captured in the sights of armed men, they are nothing but fairground tickets, tumbling down to the ground. On the ground, the men gather them and line them up.
Some are still moving, twitching, dying.
«I saw this magnificent revered pheasant struggling, desperately drawing on the last bit of life left in him to calm the pain running through him. Unblinking, the hunters watched him. Finally, one of them grabbed him by the tail and legs, shook him and put him back among the corpses. But the bird was still writhing. “Play dead”, another one ordered. Several long minutes passed still before his wings stopped moving. For good. This is what the agony of a pheasant struck in mid-flight looks like.»our investigator testified again.
Massacres every year
In the evening, after the hunt, the men count their takings. 124 pheasants, young partridges, and green woodpeckers have been shot down. The men applaud. They have earned themselves an aperitif.
Each year, millions of birds are killed in this way, slaughtered in plain flight or after months of being bred in captivity. Our investigators have been infiltrating hunts for three years. They have witnessed the ‘gifts’ which the authorities constantly deluge the hunters with. In this electoral period, the hunting lobbies will put pressure on those elected more than ever. We will not let them do it.
Translated from the French by Joely Justice