Underground badger hunting: new victories and new hearings!
The fight against the supplementary period of underground venery is a long-distance race. After securing more than 30 emergency victories last year, which saved 4,000 badgers, the courts are now overwhelmingly confirming the illegality of all these decrees. In two new annulment decisions, judges in Nantes (Vendée) and Amiens (Oise) ruled that digging up badgers at this time of year was quite simply illegal. But the battle is far from over: next hearings are scheduled for March 7 and 12, at 10 and 10.30 a.m. respectively, at the administrative courts of Limoges and Nancy, for the 2023 supplementary periods in the Haute-Vienne and Meuse departments.
Update April 2, 2024
Two new victories against badger digging! In Haute-Vienne, hundreds of badgers were due to be killed in the spring of 2023. After the emergency suspension of the prefect’s decision, AVES, ASPAS and One Voice have just obtained its definitive annulment! In Meuse, the court also overturned the decree, which this time we had challenged on our own. Judgment after judgment, justice confirms it: in addition to being cruel, the supplementary underground hunting period is illegal.
Everywhere it has been suspended as a matter of urgency, underground hunting is about to be declared illegal for good
Last summer, while hunters were sharpening their knives, shovels and pickaxes to go hunting for badgers in their burrows, we launched a large-scale campaign against badger digging. Because it’s a cruel practice that we documented by infiltrating the community, and because it leads to the killing of newborn badgers every year – which is illegal, as the Conseil d’Etat has reminded us – the courts we appealed to suspended it as a matter of urgency in over 30 departments. Nearly 4,000 individuals have been saved as a result!
And the victories continue. In two new rulings, judges in Nantes and Amiens have joined those in Caen, Clermont-Ferrand and Limoges and overturned the prefect’s decrees for the Vendée (year 2020) and the Oise (year 2023) departments.
For the Amiens judge, the situation is very clear: until they are emancipated, badgers are “young” within the meaning of the law, and “the hunting method used involves the killing of the parents and the destruction of the burrow, or even the accidental injury of a young badger by the dogs“.
New hearings and new appeals in prospect
Having obtained the suspension of the orders in Haute-Vienne and Meuse last spring, the administrative courts of Limoges and Nancy will rule definitively on these cases at the end of two hearings scheduled for March 7, 2024 at 10 a.m. and March 12, 2023 at 10:30 a.m. respectively.
Despite all these decisions, we know that the prefects, still hand in hand with the hunters, will no doubt once again authorize massacres in many departments. Everywhere, we’ll be speaking out on behalf of these individuals, killed for the sole pleasure of a few people. To help them, support us and sign the petition to put an end to underground hunting!