Forests From Farms

Practically everyone who lives in the countryside in France eventually becomes aware of presence of hunters. When we started our project nearly 20 years ago we rarely saw or heard hunters in our immediate vicinity. Over the last few years the number of hunts near us has increased to 10 or more per year bringing with them the obvious noise, disturbance and dangers. Mostly these are hunts for wild boar and involve 10 or more people with a number of excited barking dogs creating a lot of noise for a number of hours. The reason for the increase in hunts is the explosion in the population of wild boar. In 1989 there were about 80 wild boar killed in our department of he Vendée. In 2019, after more than 30 years of so-called "management" by the hunters, over 2,311 were killed by hunters.

Recently we discovered that these hunts actually violated a departmental bylaw that bans shooting in the direction of certain infrastructure such as roads, paths, electricity lines, habitations etc. We have reminded the hunters, the mayor, the police and the local office of the French Office for biodiversity of this bylaw and since then we have so far had no more problems.

You may be able to do the same in your area: every department is supposed to have such a bylaw. It may be an individual bylaw or it may be part of the Schema Départmental de Gestion Cynégétique. There is a list of all that I was able to find in the accompanying document (in french)  "Mode d'emploi SDGC" that you can download here . 

If you find that the area where you live is surrounded by appropriate infrastructure, then write to the hunters and the authorities to remind them that the rules must be applied.