“There is a path between the anti-hunting camp and the extreme hunting camp”

Ahen Bérangère Couillard, the Secretary of State for Ecology, has just announced a hunting plan, much criticized by environmental protection associations, it is worth remembering that various subjects were already making the news more than twenty years ago.

It was the plural left which, under the responsibility of Lionel Jospin, then Prime Minister, and Dominique Voynet, Minister for Regional Planning and the Environment, did most of the work to establish in our country a peaceful, sustainable and balanced hunting through the vote of the law relating to hunting, known as Patriat (named after the president of the current Renaissance group in the Senate, François Patriat, who was then a socialist deputy for Côte-d’Or), voted on June 28, 2000.

It showed that there was indeed a path between the anti-hunting camp and that of extreme hunting: the path of pragmatic progressives who consider that we cannot ignore the evolutions of our society and of the European context.

At the end of 1999, this hunting dossier was at an impasse. It was urgent to legislate because hunting law was an old law and hunters, whose numbers were steadily decreasing, felt threatened and were concerned about their future.

A non-hunting day from 2000

An old right, since it is the law of May 3, 1844 which instituted the hunting license; prohibits hunting on other people’s land and hunting at night; only authorized hunting during the periods when it is open; defines the hunting methods authorized by the permit; also prohibits the marketing and transport of game during prohibited hunting times.

Then, in 1941, 1964 and 1975, some other reforms were adopted. This was the establishment of departmental federations of hunters and the National Hunting Office, hunting plans, the examination prior to the hunting license, the modernization of the daycare and the adaptation of the hunting police. .

Read also: Why hunting divides so much in France: “The more the practice decreases, the less it is accepted and understood”

Beyond the many provisions included in the Patriat law, two of them, real markers of this text, are today of burning topicality: that provided for in article L. 420-1 of the code of environment, which states that “hunting is carried out under conditions compatible with non-appropriative uses of nature, respecting the right of ownership” ; and that concerning the establishment of a non-hunting day, in order to protect the game and allow the reconciliation of the different uses of nature.

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