Half a day per week without hunting at the local level, a blood alcohol offense for hunters, better information for walkers: Bérengère Couillard, the Secretary of State for Ecology, presented the government’s hunting plan on October 25.
Long-awaited announcements, in particular by those close to Morgan Keane, this 25-year-old man accidentally killed by a hunter’s bullet in December 2020 in Calvignac near Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in the Lot while he was chopping wood in his garden. The trial of the author of the fatal shot and the director of the beat is organized on November 17.
Interview with Léa Jaillard, friend of Morgan, on the initiative of the collective “One Day a Hunter”
and the petition (122,000 signatures) behind the senatorial mission on securing hunting
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Do you have the feeling after these announcements that things are moving forward?
It’s still very light. For us, it is not at all satisfactory in the sense that first we asked for a day at the national level, not at the local level. It is not normal that walkers have to inquire when they go to a place. And half a day at the local level, that means consultation is needed, it will take time and it will probably not be a weekend. It is feared that hunters will refuse to stop hunting on Sundaysas we ask.
What marks the spirits is this offense of alcoholism for hunters, as for motorists, which has never been established so far…
Yes it is very good, but it remains obvious. And contrary to what the hunters say, there’s nothing stigmatizing about it. We do not stigmatize all motorists when we ask them not to drink while driving. Driving drunk is dangerous, just as having a gun while drinking is dangerous. It’s obvious.
You identify with your collective all the testimonies of incidents or hunting accidents. We have the impression that there are a lot of them when the French Office for Biodiversity says that the number of hunting accidents has been falling for 20 years. Do we actually pay more attention to it?
These figures are difficult to interpret because the accidents recorded by the OFB are only those which are the subject of an intervention by the gendarmerie. So it’s still very much in the minority. The testimonies that we receive in most cases, people do not file a complaint or the gendarmes do not move. They are not listed in the OFD statistics. We want to show what we don’t talk about because people are afraid to express themselves and the gendarmes don’t listen to them either.
The official figures on hunting accidents only take into account those where the gendarmerie intervened. It’s a minority.
Your collective is at the origin of a senatorial mission on the security of hunting which auditioned you a year ago. Was it used for anything?
Yes, this mission was the subject of a report which notably proposed a ban on alcohol when hunting and a medical certificate requested each year for the renewal of the hunting licence. There are some very small advances for us even if we were not listened to on our main measures like the two days without hunting. We talk about it, that’s the main thing. Public opinion realizes that there is a problem.
There is this trial on November 17 in Cahors. The author of the shooting which killed Morgan your friend and the director of al battering will be tried for manslaughter. What do you expect?
Above all, we expect a lifetime suspension of the hunting license and a lifetime ban on possessing a weapon because that never happens. It is unacceptable that a hunter who has killed someone can continue to hold a weapon several years after the tragedy. We are also expecting a substantial compensation for Morgan’s brother from the state. We realized that in general the victims are completely ignored by the State, we do not take into account the specificity of the hunting accident which is still very violent and hyper traumatic.
What is interesting for us in this trial is that the director of the hunt is also on trial. There is a realization that it is not just the shooter who is responsible. There is also a whole system behind it: the hunt director, the State, which has not been aware of these accidents for a long time, and the courts which have never heavily sanctioned hunters at fault.