It’s a sad day today, the last weekend I can go cycling without fear of being shot, for months. I can’t believe that the whole of the country is effectively under lockdown for so long so that a few people can shoot defenceless animals and birds. Last year a passing motorist was shot by a hunter near me, the punishment? banned from hunting for a few years!! Landowners have to jump through many hoops to stop people hunting on their land, so often don’t bother. I believe there’s talk of making Sundays hunting free days, but it is only talk.
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Apparently Sunday is the most popular day for hunting, so unlikely to be hunt free. If it were to happen , it would probably be the fifth Thursday of the month between 8 and 9 am
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That’s about right!! I was out running last year on a Monday and had to sprint back home when I caught sight of a boar racing across a field and heard gun fire. No signs up to warn of the hunt.
Here is the petition to ban hunting on Sundays, created by ASPAS
So how else do you suggest the wild boar population is kept under control. Because hunting is less popular now than it used to be and the hunters have become increasingly elderly, the boar population has soared. There are at least two families of boars living in my woods. During the night they come out and dig up my grounds. Wild boar cause road accidents as hitting one with a car is likely to cause considerable damage and may cause the driver to lose control of his vehicle. During the 20 years I have lived for half the year in France, I have twice had a boar crash into the side of my car, both times luckily with only scratches to the car and no harm to the boar.
The natural control methods that are currently being tried, namely allowing the wolf population to expand has unfortunate side effects. The wolves being intelligent animals, tend to steer clear of boar, unless they are desperate for food. Other than very young piglets/shoats, a wolf attacking a wild boar has a high likelihood of injury and the wild boar sows are very protective of their young. For this reason the wolves much prefer sheep, who have over thousands of years, been bred to be timid, stupid and docile. Sheep very rarely fight back. The consequence is our local shepherd has given up keeping sheep and now only keeps goats, as they will fight back against a wolf. He said he was tired having to be ultra vigilant about wolf attacks and was still losing a significant number of sheep and lambs each year to the wolves.
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It did here because during Covid, many hunts did not happen. Several communes round here got together and employed a team of professional tracker/hunters to help to control the population.
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Clearly, if you and other folk are having so many encounters with boars, hunting is not an effective method of control. And it never has been, many of the hunters are not exactly skilled and some clearly couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo. The solution is targeted culling using professionals not hobbyists. It doesn’t have to go on for 6 months of the year and they reduce the numbers in a logical way over a limited period, usually a month. If this happened, most people would be happy, well apart from the 2% who actually hunt for sport, and then we could actually go out for a walk without fear of being shot by some amateur.
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Are you aware of the accuracy tests required to get and hold a hunting licence? I suspect not. I have never held one in France as by the time I was here, I was disabled by arthritis. However I have stalked deer in the UK. The standard deer society test was 3 shots into a three inch circle at 100 metres or many shoots demand the more difficult 3 shots in a 4 inch circle at 200 metres, which was the distance I zeroed my rifles to, so somewhat more challenging than a barn door. My mason for many years stopped boar hunting a couple of years ago because he could not meet the similar requirements in France. Cut out a four inch circle in paper set it up and walk back 200 metres. It will be a tiny dot in the distance.
Where are you going to find these professionals. They just don’t exist. Where I am in the UK on the edge of the Ashdown Forest. They have been trying to find a professional hunter for years to cull the excess deer population. One issue is that it is now very difficult to get a firearms licence in both UK and France and that puts younger folk off. In the UK, you now have to pass psychiatric tests and get a certificate from your GP before you can even start to apply for a licence. You have to keep track of every round of ammunition you possess and the local firearms officer will come and check that your records match your ammunition stocks down to the last round.
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Good.
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All of which sound like excellent things to me. USA, I’m looking at you…
All the complaints about wild animals being too numerous really don’t wash with me. They are wild animals & will do whatever they need to to survive. The modern demand for meat & dairy products means they are given easy food sources in the form of poorly fenced flocks of livestock that have…
…& then people get all surprised that they take advantage of that.
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I knew the hunting season had resumed when a plate of cerf steaks arrived at my front door yesterday.
Some years ago an elderly neighbour warned me to be careful walking the dog in the woods because the hunting season had just started.
“You may get shot accidentally” she warned.
I explained that would not be a problem if a take a Ghetto Blaster and play music very loudly so they know I am there.
“That won’t work” she replied “because they will still shoot you but on purpose”.
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Makes you wonder then why they miss the boar and hit people then doesn’t it?
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They do exist. As I said earlier in the thread, our commune with others hired professional tracker/hunters to do a cull in the vicinity. They came from about 35km away.
Edit: Ah, you’re talking about the UK which I don’t know about, but we had no problems finding them in France.
My neighbour said much the same. She thinks they deliberately target her cats, she said she’s found 3 shot since 2021. She seems to think it unlikely they mistook them for boars!! Though they were quite big!
I hope your neighbour has reported this to her Mairie !
She did, but she reckons the mayor is a keen hunter himself.
No matter, the Maire has to respond to a letter from a local resident and if she feels his reply is not sufficient… write another letter and ask for proper action.
I know my Maire and all the local Chasse… I consider them to be my friends… but if an animal of mine was shot by a local hunter … all bets are off… friendship would stand aside and I’d have their guts for garters.
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More to the point, should it become a requirement, I am sure quite a lot of existing hunters would suddenly become interested in the job.
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They do. They are considered vermin. Round here (L&G countryside), it’s how they keep down the feral cat population and they won’t distinguish between a cat living in a barn and a domestic pet if they are in a field.