Hunters losing fight as French boars run wild
Seven shots rang out as a massive male wild boar crashed out of thick woods outside Anduze, southern France, tore across a track and lurched to a halt, stone dead. Seconds later, Jean-Marc Budet, 56, emerged from the dense scrub with three baying hounds and wearing an orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Hunter and proud of it.”
Dragging the 50kg (eight-stone) beast up a steep slope, his party of orange-clad shooters proudly tied it to the bonnet of a jeep and drove the boar back to base along with another smaller male caught earlier. The game was swiftly hung up, skinned, butchered, and the meat shared out among the party.
For many around here, boar hunting is not just a sport, it is a necessity. France – like Germany and Italy, where a pensioner was filmed feeding the animals in central Rome this week – is grappling with a rocketing boar population, estimated to have surpassed the four million mark.
Hunters killed 700,000 sangliers, as the French call them, last year but the government conceded that even this astronomical figure was not enough to stem their rise and the damage they wreak on land and crops, which cost €30million (£27 million) last year, not to mention the 14,000 road accidents insurers say they caused.
This month Emmanuel Macron, the French president, launched a crisis committee after the biggest farming union, FNSEA, angrily complained their land had been turned into a “playground for hunters” who had opened a Pandora’s box of their own creation by feeding and breeding boar for decades.
Under a 1968 agreement, farmers handed their Napoleonic rights to kill any animals damaging their land over to hunters, who in exchange agreed to pay for any destruction caused by big game. But since then, the numbers of boar have rocketed 15-fold due to various factors.
Mild weather linked to climate change and vast fields of plentiful crops have led to higher reproduction rates. Farmers accuse some hunters of feeding boar by scattering grain and even cross-breeding them with domestic pigs to increase litters.
In their defence, hunters complain they have access to less and less land, as boar hide in green areas near human habitations which are out of bounds, while some big private landowners refuse them access.
A quarter of France’s crops were now maize for animal feed – vast fields where “boar hide, feed and reproduce for six months of the year”, said Willy Schraen, president of France’s National Hunters’ Federation, FNC.
Nowhere is the issue more pressing than in the Gard – a département, or county, that stretches from the Mediterranean coast west of Montpellier to the Cévennes mountains. Last year, some 42,000 boar were killed in the Gard, including 1,500 within a three-kilometre radius of Anduze – a pretty protestant bastion famed for its earthenware vases and dubbed the “gateway to the Cevennes”. .
“Our small band of 10 men killed 140 right here,” said Mr Budet, whose party scour the land twice a week and only shoot boar at close quarters.
Equipped with GPS collars and bells, their dogs hare into the undergrowth in search of quarry, their intermittent barks turning to long howls to signal the chase is on. But the fight is not all one-way: 10 dogs have been wounded wou by boar in the past month. Two weeks ago, the hunters shot a fearsome specimen weighing 130kg (20stone).
These are not the clueless creatures that the cartoon character Obelix nonchalantly plucks from the forests of Gaul, but highly intelligent animals with an incredibly keen sense of hearing and smell.
“Don’t mention the word sanglier,” said Hugues Falgari, a grape farmer who has 100 acres of vines 30 miles to the west in Verfeuil. The area is one of the Gard’s 68 “black zones” where the worst boar damage occurs.
He pointed to a row of chardonnay vines stripped of their grapes. “They have eaten all 250kg on this row. I’ve seen them standing up on their hind legs to get the top ones. All that’s left are the small, unripe bunches, which they’ll come back for once they sweeten. They’re quite picky and seem to prefer chardonnay to cabernet sauvignon,” he said.
The 44-year-old is still on parole after being handed a suspended sentence two years ago for opening fire on boar in his vineyards at night, a practice only trained state marksmen – known as wolf lieutenants – are allowed to perform. “I was tried like a common criminal when all I was doing was defending my grapes,” he said.
Meanwhile, as the hunters shared out their spoils in Anduze, one of the veterans, Jean-Jacques Alonzo, 60, pointed to the grey-haired men in the room. “We’re getting old and there are no young hunters to replace us. Then what will they do with the boar?”