Safety project by the Senate Hunt — Associations that are victims of hunting and animal advocates report on a shameless link and ask for fast governmental action

Safety project by the Senate Hunt — Associations that are victims of hunting and animal advocates report on a shameless link and ask for fast governmental action

In December 2021, the success of the ‘deaths, violence, and abuse linked to hunting: never again!” petition filed by the ‘Un jour un chasseur’ collective on an online platform for citizen petitions on the Senate’s site led to the creation of a monitoring project for safety in hunting. In the framework of this monitoring project, the Commission of Economic Affairs and Commission of Law senators heard from many participants linked with the hunting world, including several signatory associations of this press release.

The Senate’s report on the monitoring project on safety in hunting has just been released. It dismisses almost all of the measures requested in the official petition at the start of this project.

This petition, which obtained 122,424 signatures in just two months, proposed five reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of everyone and to fight against the violence and abuse linked to hunting:

• Wednesdays and Sundays without hunting;
• more strict training and follow-up for hunters and reinforcement of the safety rules in place;
• real control over hunting weapons in circulation in the country and an awareness of the danger they represent for public safety;
• more discouraging sanctions against hunters having caused incidents, physical accidents, or fatal accidents;
• and an awareness of ‘hunting accidents’ for what they are: condemnable acts, intolerable violence, and in no way unremarkable or insignificant.

These measures, despite being requested and supported by a huge majority of country people, have, almost all, been ignored by the Senate’s task force. The few efforts requested of hunters are the pretext for the establishment of measures limiting freedom of circulation and expression of 98% of non-hunters, without actually ensuring their safety. The irony: the commission has just agreed to new tax benefits for certain categories of hunters, without any link to safety.

This report does not take into account the very strong constraints that hunting has on the 98% of non-hunters, up to 7 days a week and 10 months a year in a large part of France.

The associations that are victims of hunting and protect animals have reported on the commission’s bias having worked on this report, while even the measures needed have been developed from testimonies of victims and those close to the people who have disappeared. This indecency shocks us.

We can only regret the choice by senators to ignore the very strong demand by public opinion for better safety in hunting: on a recurring basis, the surveys show that more than 80% of French people are favourable to a ban on hunting for at least two days a week and during the entirety of the school holidays (IPSOS/One Voice surveys in October 2018 and September 2021).

After having appealed to elected representatives for a result which goes against the tide of societal expectations, the associations that are victims of hunting and for animal protection deem it necessary to appeal directly to democracy so that the wishes of the vast majority of citizens be respected.

We are therefore asking for a referendum on establishing non-hunting Sundays and Wednesdays, safety areas around houses, and a limitation on the range of weapons.

We are also urgently asking for a meeting between the Interior and Ecological Ministries.

Signatory associations:

• Animal Cross
• AOC
• ASPAS
• AVA
• Fondation Brigitte Bardot
• LPO
• LFDA
• One Voice
• RAC
• Ruraux en colère
• Stéphane Lamart
• Un jour un chasseur