The incident that a teenager hunting wild boar accidentally killed a hiker has sparked a fierce debate about stricter regulations on French hunting traditions ahead of the presidential election in April. .
The 25-year-old woman was walking with a friend along a marked trail near Aurillac in the heavily forested Cantal region when she was hit by a stray bullet on Saturday. She died instantly.
The 17-year-old who pulled the trigger was part of an organized hunt in the woods and received her hunting license at the age of 16. She was treated in hospital for shock and was still being questioned by police on Monday morning. Tests showed no traces of drugs or alcohol in her body.
The killing has sparked a flurry of hunting accidents in France and whether tough new regulations should be introduced to limit hunting on certain days or weekends. France is the country with the largest number of hunters in Europe. It is the only country that allows daily hunting during the hunting season – unlike other countries that have introduced no-hunting days, allowing for more security for hikers.
“We urgently need more regulation of this activity,” said Yannick Jadot, the Greens presidential candidate. He said an Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of French people want to ban hunting on weekends and during school holidays.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is leading in the polls among left-wing candidates, said “this heinous catastrophe makes us stop to think”. He called for a ban on weekends and school holidays “because that’s when the risk is greatest”. But he said he did not want to ban hunting altogether because it would cause chaos in France.
Hunting in France is not considered a class issue, unlike in England. The French Revolution stripped the nobility of the exclusive hunting rights and today many of France’s more than 1 million hunters are working class, especially in the southwest and northeast of the country. Hunting in France varies from wild boar and deer to different birds. Unlike in England, hunting on horseback with hounds is not banned, although it is a minority sport.
The centrist Emmanuel Macron adopt a supportive stance at the start of his presidency, seen as a way to woo the rural vote.
Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen says hunting in France is “an ancestral tradition that needs to be preserved”. Weekends shouldn’t be banned, she says, but stricter safety measures are needed to allow hikers and hunters to enjoy the forest.
“If it turns out that we need to tighten the rules even more, we will,” Macron’s foreign minister in charge of biodiversity, Bérangère Abba, told Agence France-Presse, noting that France had already approved alerted the creation of an application that could indicate areas where hunts were taking place.
Le Monde cited figures from France’s biodiversity office on 3,325 hunting accidents in France since 2000, resulting in 421 deaths.
In recent months, France has banned a number of strongly criticized bird-hunting techniques, such as net or cage hunting or glue trap huntingaccordance with the 2009 EU directive.
