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One Voice is back at the Administrative Tribunals to save mountain Galliformes

One Voice is back at the Administrative Tribunals to save mountain Galliformes

One Voice is back at the Administrative Tribunals to save mountain Galliformes
29.08.2023
One Voice is back at the Administrative Tribunals to save mountain Galliformes
Hunting

Following our victories last year, in particular in the High Alps and Savoie, we decided to heighten our fight for mountain Galliformes. The hunting season is open, as are those from the hearings! The first one of this new 2023-2024 season will take place on 30 August at 2pm at the Montpellier Administrative Tribunal.

These wonderful birds truly have many threats weighing against them… for example, we are thinking about global warming that strongly affects mountain environments and the animals that live there, disruptions during sensitive periods due to tourist seasons, or even deforestation… And on top of this, they are still hunted despite common sense and their deplorable conservation status!

As an example, the grey mountain partridges are classified as ‘near-threatened’ on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list in France, which indicates that the species will be faced with a heightened risk of extinction in the wild in the near future.

Despite this sub-species of grey partridge only being present in the Pyrenean chain, the Pyrénées-Orientales Prefect has, within the decree opening the 2023-2024 hunting season, directly authorised killing two partridges per day and per head (with a maximum limit of 10 partridges per hunter) during the period from 17/09/2023 to 11/11/2023.

It is all the more unbearable that this morbid quota is perfectly arbitrary since the administration has not even waited for the results of the tally that took place in the summer to define a number of grey mountain partridges to be slaughtered. The Prefect has therefore not based this on any methodology.

Either way, continuing to authorise this massacre is quite simply absurd and unjustifiable. Slaughtering birds does not respond to any justifiable need to ‘regulate’ (impossible for hunters to hide behind this kind of argument) a species that is already threatened everywhere and whose representatives are just asking to live in peace. In other words, such a hunt has no other function than a hobby for those who practice it. An unhealthy and particularly debatable hobby on an ethical level, at a time when biodiversity and the living beings who comprise it are suffering a mass slump.

For all of these reasons, One Voice has entered a plea for a cancellation and an emergency interim suspension proceeding. The hearing, set for 30 August, will tell us if our sensible arguments have convinced the Tribunal. In any case, we will continue to fight for every grey partridge’s life and all the more so for all mountain Galliformes!

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Animal testing: twenty rulings asking for transparency

Animal testing: twenty rulings asking for transparency

Animal testing: twenty rulings asking for transparency
25.08.2023
Animal testing: twenty rulings asking for transparency
Animal testing

Case files come one after the other and are similar: since last summer, thirteen new tribunals have told prefectures in twenty departments to provide their inspection reports for animal testing laboratories. This is in addition to around thirty rulings already obtained since Autumn 2021.

These new rulings concern the Charente-Maritime, Landes, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Seine-Saint-Denis, Dordogne, Gironde, Yvelines, Essonne, Côte-d’Or, Guyane, Mayenne, Maine-et-Loire, Loire Atlantique, Vendée, Corrèze, Indre, Calvados, Haute-Garonne, Haute-Vienne, and Drôme Prefectures. The laboratories are in particular those at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment [INRAE], several University Institutes of Technology [IUT] and Universities, Sanofi, and also the French Office for Biodiversity, Dordogne Breeders’ Association, Dijon Agro Institute, French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and the Equitechnic company among others.

We find it difficult to understand how prefectures and their veterinary services (DDPP) still refuse to provide animal testing laboratory inspection reports after all of the rulings that oblige them to do so.

Transparency scares administrations

Prefectures’ justifications are always the same: (unfounded) fears for safety, criticism from animal associations, or the unbelievable idea that if the public have access to laboratory inspection reports, this would undermine investigations into violations and the enforcement of the law.

But tribunals are rarely fooled: while some rulings have authorised prefectures to hide very specific information, almost all of them only authorise names of laboratory staff and veterinary inspectors being redacted.

Such reluctance from the administration would be almost laughable if it were not so dramatic, when we know that sanctions are excessively rare and insignificant.

Transparency is substantive work

Not that these are the first lies issued by the administration to cover up their lack of transparency… It is therefore our responsibility to continue monitoring and carrying out substantive work, in order to gather information helping to report on the limits of the regulations and their application.

These documents allow us to finally note situations of animal mistreatment – always serious, sometimes illegal -in order to report on them and to attack those responsible through the justice system or to act against the inaction of the administration when this is possible.

Thus, even when the administration does not learn any lessons, each new ruling in favour of transparency is a victory.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice