Hunting, Food Security, and Biodiversity in France

Nearly half of the French population is against hunting. But according to the hunting federation, food security and biodiversity would be undermined without the hard work and passion of hunters in the Hautes Pyrenees.

I don’t need to check my calendar to know when hunting season has arrived in France. I just wait until the first gunshots start ringing out in the forest around my home. For the following months, I’m frequently woken by howling hunting dogs, and I shrug a high-vis vest on before collecting wood or feeding my animals outside. 

Every year, people are killed by hunters in France due to ricochet of bullets or mistaken identity (like the man shot dead as he chopped wood in his garden – mistaken for a wild boar).¹ The number of people dying in hunting accidents has steadily come down over the last 20 years, from 39 in the 1999/2000 season to 6 in the 2022/2023 season.² However, because of the small number of tragic deaths that still occur, 87% of French people believe that hunting is a danger for walkers.³ And like many of my neighbours, I avoid going outside when I see the pickup trucks of hunters near my home.

A man walks with a placard depicting a target with a hiker and reading 'smile, you're targeted’, two months after the killing of a young man by a hunter in the Pyrenees, 2020. The protesters demand better regulations of hunting, and a better safety for hikers and cyclists. Photo via Getty.

I used to think hunting was a fundamentally bad thing. I was concerned about safety, wild animal welfare, and ecological function. After all, 69% of measured wild animal populations have declined since 1970 - surely we need all the wild animals we can get?⁴

I visited the hunting federation of the Hautes Pyrenees, where I was kindly welcomed by the director Jérôme Cornus and his colleague Valérie Andrieu, to discover another point of view.

Hunting and biodiversity with Jérôme Cornus

Rachel:  There is a lot of tension between ecologists and hunters in France. Why is that?

Jérôme: What people don’t realise is that I’m an ecologist. I’m just not ideological about it. Hunters do a considerable amount to protect biodiversity in France. We regulate the number of wild animals like wild boar and deer, which have exploded due to climate change and a lack of predators. Of course, all species have a place in the world, but we must find a balance. 

Rachel: Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the hunting federation that released wild boar into the wild a few decades ago? 

Jérôme: You’re not wrong. In collaboration with the local government, the National Hunting Union legally released a small number of wild boar females with collars so they wouldn’t be shot. At that time, in the 80s and 90s, we believed it would help maintain a stable number of wild boars. 
But since then, conditions have changed a lot. 

Before, the mountain got cold in winter. It would reach minus 15 degrees, so only some wild boar survived until spring. But have you seen the state of the climate today? Hautacam [the local ski station] hasn’t bothered to open in some years. There is no snow, and far more boarlets are surviving. Some sows are even having two litters instead of one.

I’ve been director of the federation for 26 years, and I can promise that we have never released a wild boar in that time. If we found hunters secretly raising wild boar to release them, they would get in serious trouble.

Wild boar in an autumn forest during the hunting season. Photo via Getty.

Rachel: You talk about the growing population of wild boar as if it is “bad” for ecology. Why is that? 

Jérôme: All species have a place in nature, but wild boar numbers are out of balance. For example, ground-nesting birds, particularly sensitive species like the western capercaillie, are disappearing. When wild boars fall upon the nests of ground-nesting birds, they eat the eggs. They’ll even eat chicks. Like domesticated pigs, wild boars eat pretty much anything.

Rachel: Didn’t I see a stuffed western capercaillie on display on my way in? Is it fair to give wild boar all the blame, or are hunters killing them, too?

Jérôme: Each year, we look at data for every sector to decide how many animals can be killed that year. We cannot touch the “capital” of any animal population, but only the “interest.” That means hunters are limited in how many animals they can kill to ensure wild animal numbers are protected. But for animals like wild boars, we absolutely can’t keep up with their population surge.

Another major reason for native bird decline, at least in our mountains, is climate change. The changing climate puts additional pressure on species like the rock ptarmigan, an alpine bird that turns snow white in the winter to blend in with the snow, and a beautiful, marbled rock at times that snow would be melting. The bird disappears as the natural camouflage does the opposite in a world without snow. And as species like wild boar and deer eat the native vegetation (and sometimes destroy nests), the pressure is too much.

The Western Capercaillie, a heavy member of the grouse family, is critically endangered in the Pyrenees. Photo via Getty. 

Rachel: How else do hunters help biodiversity?

Jérôme: Due to the overpopulation of wild boars and deer, we see places where the wild berries are eaten before the birds can feed. And when many species go hungry because a minority are eating all the food – that’s when we have too many of a species. But as well as reducing the numbers of wild boar and deer, the hunting federation is also paying for the replanting of native hedges so our indigenous birds have more food available.

Find out more about the importance of hedges here. 

We do lots of things in the background. This morning, one of my technicians has gone off to help some farmers in the mountains. They’ve put fences in place to protect their sheep, but there’s a risk that the ground-feeding birds will get tangled up in them and die. So, we go up there and work with the farmers to attach visual warnings to the fences so the birds can see them and go around. Hunting and farming are often complementary.

Installation of an electric fence to protect a field of corn against wild boars. Photo via Getty. 

Hunting and food security with Jérôme Cornus

Rachel: Can you give any more examples of hunting supporting farming?

Jérôme: By regulating certain wild animals, hunters can help protect food from being destroyed, particularly from wild boar and deer, in the fields and vineyards. Roe deer love eating young grape buds, which can completely wipe out a crop. And in the absence of wolves and bears, and with habitats for those big predators so fragmented - hunting is the only realistic solution to bring some balance back to the equation.

Rachel: It makes sense, in the absence of wolves and bears, that the numbers are exploding. But I also heard that hunters feed grain to wild boar sometimes, so doesn’t that artificially pump up the numbers and threaten food security even more?

Jérôme: Occasionally, we put down some grain at very specific periods of the year. But this isn’t to attract wild boar or fatten them up. We might do this to protect a farmer’s harvest when they are planting corn. This year, hundreds of hectares of local corn were destroyed and eaten by wild boar as soon as it was planted. The boars hear the tractors and come running out of the woods for a feast. We learned that by putting a little grain in the woods at critical times, we can keep the boar busy and help protect our farmers’ harvest. 

Rachel: Are there any other ways that hunters support farmers?

Jérôme: There are fewer and fewer farmers in France. And as land gets abandoned, it becomes overgrown with invasive and non-native species. In the high mountains, we help the farmers who are fighting to keep going by stopping invasive plants from taking over, which is also important for a lot of wild flora and fauna.

We take machinery up into the mountains; sometimes, we transport it by helicopter. And after we’ve put the machines up there, we send our technicians to drive them. We don’t just open the land indiscriminately; we make paths into the thorns so that when the remaining livestock come back to the mountains for summer, like the sheep, the cows and so on… they can access the land better and continue to keep the land open. If we don’t help with that, the livestock can’t access much of the land, and it becomes less biodiverse and creates more of a fire risk.

Hunting divides opinion - but there are no easy answers

As I drive back from the hunting federation, I feel the uneasy tug of my preconceived ideas being challenged. I can’t speak for the rest of France, but I can tell that the hunting federation in this mountain region cares about the natural world more than I had imagined. And I’ve seen evidence of wild animals and food production clashing. At my local market, much to the disappointment of the clientele, one producer recently had no salad leaves after a deer herd got into the greenhouse and took out the lot. Farmers have always had to put up with some loss to wild animals, but it seems like the problem is getting significantly worse. 

At the same time - I know that the vast majority of hunting in France relies on “the battu” - sending dogs into the forest to chase wild animals out into the open where they are shot. In my idealistic vision, I would want hunters to hide in a tree at dawn and wait for an unsuspecting animal to nonchalantly graze its way within shooting distance.

But to reduce the risk of accidents like the young man who lost his life when he was chopping wood in his garden, this kind of stealth hunting is strongly discouraged, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get the necessary permissions to hunt without a group of people wearing high-visibility vests, who have to attend a safety briefing in the morning and who are under the responsibility of the local hunt leader. The issues surrounding hunting, safety, animal welfare, food security, and biodiversity are more complicated than I realised - and I’m left sympathising with many different stakeholders in equal measure.