ASPAS : Association pour la Protection des Animaux Sauvages are campaigning for a ban on Sunday hunting, plus extension of the safety perimeter round homes. They are also demanding annual health checks, especially vision, of hunters and more alcohol testing. These campaign points are being proposed in the light of hunting accidents.
It would certainly make a significant difference to our lives since we are on the 'border' of two associations whose overlap means that hereabouts with their chosen days it comes to seven day hunting. Apart from that, the hunters walk all over people who wish to simply share the countryside with them. I am not anti at all and occasionally go out with the local men. However, I've recently been riding out somebody's horses for him and either have to do it concentrating on whether I hear vans, off-roaders and shots nearby or simply ride around a couple of fields where I should be safe. Walkers are simply told they cannot (not allowed) to go along yellow waymarked paths. It is not supposed to be that way.
Let's hope somebody listens to these demands and does something.
I put the dogs in the car and drive 13km to the lake at Orthez to walk the dogs on Sunday. I was brought up on a farm and my father used to go out with a gun from time to time, and there were major organised pheasant shoots etc nearby, but I was never worried about riding or walking dogs as it was all well organised. I am not anti hunting - I am anti drunk in charge of a firearm let alone a white van!
Oh dear, that's what the French believe but actually find out about hunting and the connection with the revolution soon dissolves. It was because there were no laws/rules and the aristocracy who had been the ones who hunted before having been purged that they made laws to enable people to hunt. Until the laws were in place it was havoc. Those laws have been revised up until as recently as the 1980s. They are broken, arrogantly defended as the right to do so by those who break the law and need to be changed. The booze is very necessary too, I go out with them sometimes - they shoot and drive on the amount they put away which is tolerated and laughed at by even the people they could potentially kill.
I agree Brian, but as my French wife points out, the right to hunt has been part of the French psyche since the revolution.
I read in Sud Ouest recently that a beekeeper had been shot by a hunter who "saw something moving in the undergrowth". If driving a car under the influence of alcohol is an arrestable offence then so too, should using a shotgun or rifle. I tend to walk our dogs in the forest behind us during the hours of noon and 1400, especially at weekends, but there is no guarantee there will not be some armed men out there!