Isn't it clearly better to let a wild boar live on than to risk killing a man? The argument against hunting goes on in France and the sentiment expressed here is from a woman in a letter to a southern newspaper, who reveals that on the day before the end of last year's season, her husband, a father of two, was shot dead by a hunter. Never, she warns, should a shot be fired before the prey is clearly seen. Hunters must never shoot blindly into bushes or trees or sedge or crops. Your gun is made to kill, she writes. Don't work on intuition or your instincts. The rustle you hear may be made by another hunter, or a person just out for a walk, or someone gathering mushrooms.
Hunters explain last year's figures of 45 dead and over 200 injured by the fact that in many parts of the country what they call small game (feathered or fur) is scarce and more and more they now go after wild boars and the antlered species of big game. These are often driven in what are called battues through woods or scrub. Thus a crash or rustling in the vegetation may be made by a man as easily as by an animal. Last year's figures shocked the hunting world and in 1998 the Little Green Book issued annually to France's 1.5 million hunters is devoted to safety - for the first time in its 21 years of existence. In Paris the much respected and austere daily newspaper, Le Monde, gave nearly a page to the escalating differences between hunters and people who just want to be out in the country walking. The paper quotes a petition to have hunting banned in a forest of 3,000 hectares near Senat (Essonne).
Elsewhere, some 60 associations have written to prefects and to the Minister of the Interior to have hunting banned on Sunday afternoons. Fifty per cent of last year's accidents happened on Sunday. And a man called Berthelot, whose daughter was killed in a battue in 1966, will next month be launching a campaign on the Internet.