Violence, hooligans, battles for the law: what France's hunt saboteurs are up against
Like Britain, but different.
Like the UK, France has a long and rich history of hunting with hounds. Unlike the UK, the activity remains legal. This has led to increasing numbers of hunt saboteur groups emerging across France in recent years. As a result, the government is drafting a new law that will create huge risks for sabbing. But, as The Citro found out, the anti-hunting movement remains defiant.
Not yet done
In April 2019, French anti-hunting association AVA (Abolissons la Vénerie Aujourd’hui, or Let’s Abolish Hunting With Hounds Today) posted on Facebook that:
The Senate has just adopted an amendment creating the “offence of obstructing hunting”… [that will] “punish with one year’s imprisonment and a €30,000 fine for opposing an act of hunting”.
The amendment, dated 10th April 2019, came as part of merging the government’s offices for biodiversity and hunting into a single body.
As its basis it uses allegations of sab aggression familiar to those in the UK. These include claims of spraying citronella in hounds’ eyes, attacks on horses, and “physical assaults” on hunters. The amendment’s wording says that France’s national hunting federation pushed for the law in order to “prevent real tragedies from occurring”.
Though obstructing hunting was widely reported in French media and even Britain’s own FieldsportsTV as “now an offence”, that’s inaccurate. “This bill has still only been voted by the upper house of the Parliament, which means it is not in force,” an AVA spokesperson told The Citro.
Engaging in direct action against hunts isn’t a risk-free business though. In 2010, the French government made sabotaging a hunt punishable with a €1,500 fine. The intention of the 2019 amendment is to increase the jeopardy associated with directly confronting hunters.
“Fortunately,” AVA said, “these threats have never stopped the anti-hunting movement.”
Death of a stag
Hunting in France shares similarities with hunting in the UK, and has some key differences too. AVA told The Citro that, from its roots in the 16th Century, hunting with hounds was the preserve of “kings and lords”. The pastime acted as “warfare training” while framing an entire lifestyle “codified with rules, rituals, music and clothing”. And today there are “around 400 hunts” across the country. So far, so similar.
But the hierarchy of quarry is distinct from the UK. AVA said that:
in France [there are] two kinds of “vénerie”: the “Petite vénerie”, practised on foot and considered a “lower” kind of hunt because it focuses on small animals, thus requiring limited land and a smaller pack, where foxes, hares, and rabbits are hunted; and the “Grande vénerie” (the “higher” one) which targets roes, boars and stags.
Stag is considered the most prestigious quarry while “fox hunting is not particularly popular, unlike in the UK”.
Meanwhile, AVA said, an explicitly anti-hunting movement has existed in France since “the late 70s”. And that:
Organizations such as the ROC (Anti-Hunting Rally) and SAF (Let’s Save Animals of the Forest) lead sabotages, and protests were organized by the SPA (Society for the Protection of Animals). Then it calmed down, until Droit Des Animaux (Animals’ Rights) organised direct actions again in the 2010s, which ended with a trial.
AVA was set up in 2016 in the north of France “where a hunt mastered by the Baroness Rothschild regularly caused trouble,” the group explained. It brought communities from around the Compiègne Forest out to “push hunters away from villages, monitor the hunts, and step in to protect animals when possible”.
The French sab group’s activities rapidly picked up speed. In October 2017, AVA’s footage of the Compiègne hunt murdering a stag in a residential garden made national news and even reached the UK press. It sparked a ‘national conversation’ about hunting and may well have been a factor in 2019’s anti-sab law amendment.
Anti-hunting direct action has flourished since.
“After our first season in this forest,” AVA said, “a dozen local groups popped up in only a few months! Today there are about twenty all over France.”
Hunt havoc
Little has changed since that video hit the mainstream press. AVA told The Citro that it has witnessed 38 incidents in total this year despite multiple Covid-19 lockdowns supposedly stopping hunting. The group gave details on some of the more shocking incidents, saying:
The season kicked off with an awful scene on the side of the road: hounds chased an exhausted stag down near a construction site. It would have been killed if it weren’t for the witnesses and the local AVA members who stopped to protect it. A few weeks later, a llama was killed by hounds in a farm. Dogs were attacked, animals were killed near people’s houses or chased down in their gardens, hounds were lost for weeks, others were ran over by cars, car accidents were caused.
Hunt havoc isn’t limited to the UK, it seems. And AVA shared details of one particularly incredible incident:
the worst highlight of this past season was when a hunt chased a stag down to a train station in a town of 10,000 people near Paris. The hounds surrounded the animal on the tracks and fifty trains were cancelled on this very busy line. Fortunately, the firemen took charge and the stag went back to the forest alive.
AVA itself has had a little more luck than the stags and hounds of France. It won all its court cases against what it said were allegations of “made-up violence” by hunts. And its actions finally brought the issue of a hunting ban into the French parliament during October 2020. But most importantly, its activist and support base grew:
we gathered more people than ever in the forests to monitor hunts and in the villages to protect hunted animals, and the last local elections resulted in a new generation of mayors ready to take action against [hunt] misbehaviour.
International solidarity
France’s anti-hunting movement is in a more nascent stage than Britain’s. But that’s only fostered cross-Channel solidarity between movements.
“We studied the history of the anti-hunting movement in the UK,” AVA said, “and worked with the Hunt Saboteurs Association right from the beginning to learn more about hunting with hounds.”
A few months after AVA’s 2017 stag killing video blew up, UK sabs crossed the Channel to link up with France’s Compiègne Forest AVA group. A second cross-Channel joint sab took place the following season, in December 2018. And AVA members have joined British sab groups to gain experience on this side of the water too, AVA said. Meanwhile, representatives of the HSA hosted a conference to share information and skills used by British groups.
This is important, AVA explained, because the landscape of the hunt and the anti-hunt in France is following a similar trajectory to Britain:
As the years go by, we notice that the French anti-hunting movement experiences the same history as the British one nearly twenty years later: the same violence, the same stewards acting as hooligans, the same lies, the same battle for a law… Knowing that, our greatest fear is that someone gets killed as we get closer to a ban on hunting with hounds. This is very interesting as it helps us predict what awaits us on all fronts! We are always one step ahead.
One example of the aggression faced by French sabs was shared by PACCT, another French anti-hunting group. The group uploaded a video on 23rd February 2021 showing a brawl between hunt supporters and sabs near Rambouillet, south-west of Paris.
Just the beginning
When the amendment was announced, AVA said, France’s hunting community “claimed victory, of course”. This was reinforced by incorrect or misleading reporting by the media, as previously highlighted. “For months afterwards,” the group said, “we received messages from people who were worried about us and had not realized this bill had not even been voted by the Parliament!”
The law protects hunting far better in France than it does in the UK today. Nonetheless, this has done little to deter direct action. “Nothing has changed for us,” AVA told The Citro. “We have a good knowledge of the law and of the political strategy behind this, so we are well-prepared if this was to become law one day. Our strength is our local roots and nothing can beat that.”
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