Autumn really is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in the Jura. If you’re driving down a country road you may see men looming through the fog with rifles slung over their shoulders, one of them perhaps restraining a boisterous dog.
If visibility is clearer, especially of a weekend in the run-up to Christmas, you will pass men with guns and fluorescent orange jackets, their cars parked nearby, staring intently towards the woods. Maybe dogs will be barking in the distance. Perhaps a panicked deer will run across the road in front of you.
It’s the hunting season, whose beginning – any time after the end of August -and closure – usually before the end of February – is announced by officials in each département every year. The dates vary according to what kind of game is concerned – big beasts, like deer and boar; smaller mammals such as rabbits and hares; or wildfowl.
If you go down to the woods, wear high-vis
It’s strongly advised to wear high-vis yourself if you’re planning to go walking in the woods and, should you come across a board advising that a hunt is taking place, you may judge it wise to go home and sit in front of a nice warm fire.
You will wish to avoid the fate of Morgan Keane. In 2020 he was shot dead at the age of 25 while chopping wood on his allotment in south-west France.
The hunter who killed him said he mistook Morgan (whose mother was French and father British) for a wild boar. He was given a two-year suspended sentence and banned from hunting for life.
Statistically speaking, the danger is not that great. In the 2024-25 season, there were 11 fatal hunting accidents, all of them hunters. The total number of people injured was 92, 60 of them seriously, and 84% were hunters.
There has in fact been a decline in fatalities from 24 in 2006, although last year’s was a rise on the six of each of the previous two years (all but one of them were hunters).
Eleven deaths are obviously 11 too many but the toll is dwarfed by the 759 fatal industrial accidents in the same year, not to mention the 3,260 people killed on the roads, which raises the question of how many deaths we deem acceptable for the sake of the economy or convenience.
Greens call for partial hunting ban
In 2021 Ecologist presidential candidate Yannick Jadot called for hunting to be banned at weekends and during school holidays, claiming that 70% of hunters live in towns and that country folk don’t dare go walking on Sundays.
Country living means “enjoying the landscape, being able to go hiking, going cycling, taking your dog for a walk without being worried he’ll be shot at the end of the trail”, he said.
Jadot’s claim that most hunters don’t live in the country is hotly contested by hunting groups, who are energetic lobbyists, and, without having carried out a systematic poll, I have come across no particular hostility to the practice in the village where I live.
“Everyone knows a hunter”
I have to declare an interest: I love to eat game and, if you’re going to kill creatures for food, it seems to me better, both for them and for the environment, that they should have spent their lives in the wild than in a factory farm.
When I moved to the Jura, I thought game would be plentiful in season. But I found none in the local butchers or on the markets. The lady who runs the butcher’s shop in Poligny told me they didn’t have it on the counter “because around here everyone knows a hunter and can get game from them”. I eventually sourced some through my neighbour Jacques’s contacts.
Different attitudes to the countryside
When Jadot called for the weekend ban, a sociologist who studies rural life told Le Parisien newspaper that it would have little effect on weekending urban professionals who, he said, tend to hunt on private reserves.
The controversy reflected two different attitudes to the countryside, the sociologist claimed.
For urbanites it’s a space for relaxation and appreciation; real rural folk see it as a source of sustenance (sentimental townee that I am, I’m currently agonising over the fate of a sapling that grew in my garden, while my neigbours down the road are merrily felling dozens of trees, safe in the knowledge that 46% of the Jura is covered in forest and that we won’t be running out any day soon).
Hunting and the law
In any case, you can’t just pick up your rifle and go hunting in France. You must have a licence and, this being France, you must undergo a theoretical and a practical test to get one. The law has been progressively tightened over recent decades, hunters being obliged to wear a fluorescent jacket since 2019, for example.
The most obviously cruel forms of hunting, such as chasse à glu – hunting with birdlime, which traps birds with sticky substances on branches – are banned, although not without opposition from some “traditionalists” and, of course, there is no agreement as to where to draw the line – is hunting with dogs OK? What about digging out badgers’ sets?
And endangered species are protected by both French and European law. Killing, mutilating or capturing them can be punished by up to three years in jail and/or a fine of up to 150,000 euros.
Fewer hunters, more boars
The number of hunters is in decline, falling from 2,219,051in 1976 to 963,571 in 2023.
Meanwhile, ungulates (the big beasts) are definitely not endangered. Their numbers have soared in the past 50 years – red deer by 15 times to about 82,000, roe deer by 12 to about 600,000 and boar by 22 to about 800,000.
This sounds like good news. But not if you’re a farmer. Ungulates are estimated to have caused 60 million euros-worth of damage to agricultural land in 2022-23. The boar is the biggest villain, credited with causing 85% of the bestial vandalism.
Initially, the proliferation was partly the hunters’ fault. They released animals bred in captivity, some crossed with domesticated pigs and more fertile than wild boars. This practice is now banned, although the gendarmes still bust illegal breeding grounds from time to time.
But the numbers continue to rise .
This is partly due to a decline in the number of natural predators like wolves and lynxes. But it’s chiefly because of human activities, such as the government-sponsored encouragement of large-scale farming, that provides wild animals with a ready source of food, and because of climate change, responsible for more of the young surviving the winter and for females being able to give birth sooner.
Indeed, there are increasing reports of boars venturing into built-up areas, although no French shoppers have yet suffered the fate of the Italian woman who was mugged by a family of wild boars in a supermarket carpark or the German nudist obliged to run after a beast that had run off with his laptop.
So, for the sake of agriculture and the environment, these animals must be culled and the government calls on hunters to do the deed.
Who opposes hunting?
Although many of the most vociferous anti-hunters are on the left, there is no strict left-right divide on the question. Readers of Brigitte Bardot’s more honest obituaries will have noted that as well as being a passionate opponent of cruelty to animals, she was a committed supporter of the far-right Front National, a virulent Islamophobe and not that keen on humanity in general .
On the other hand, the Communist Party has always supported hunting. Its current leader Fabien Roussel has even suggested founding a Communist hunters club as part of the bid to construct an image as an average French mec that has led to him to bragging about how much he enjoys a rib of beef and make a distasteful joke about Green leader Marine Tondelier.
The party has always regarded the right to hunt as part of the legacy of the French revolution, which ended the feudal restriction of the right to hunt deer and boar to the aristocracy.
Inspired not only by the wish to keep the best game for the upper crust but also by the fear of peasants having weapons, the feudal law punished poaching with whipping, banishment, forced labour and, for repeat offenders, the death penalty (the Normans extended restrictions on hunting and access to forests after conquering England, punishing infractions with imprisonment or maiming).
Who loves nature most?
Hunters’ organisations respond to the Greens’ hostility, and a public image that leaves something to be desired, with the claim that they are in fact France’s greatest ecologists.
Although some of the pro-hunting arguments seem disingenuous – that the small number of equestrian hunts in France save horses from the abattoir, for example – hunters do have an interest in preserving natural environments and contribute to the maintenance and restoration of wetlands, the planting of hedges, which many French farmers are not keen on, and the clearing of litter in rural areas.
The place where hunters pick up their licences – the Maison de le nature et de l’environnement – delicately avoids the mention of hunting in its title, although it is administered by hunters’ groups in collaboration with a state agency.
The Jura centre is nestled in a small wood just off the A39 motorway. When I visited, not to collect a licence, it was hosting an impressive display on the lynx, reminding us that we must share the booty of nature with this beautiful animal, native to France’s mountains but absent from the Jura between 1885 and the 1970s.
There were pamphlets on hunting as “the heart of biodiversity” and a project to restore a lake and surrounding wetlands, leaflets on recognising wild animals, monitoring wildfowl numbers, the health benefits of eating game and a row with bird-lovers over the length of the snipe-hunting season, and free packets of seeds of meadow flowers.
One display was less ecologically correct – a case full of stuffed birds, who had attracted hunters’ attention.
