Violence at a hound hunt once again: recreational hunters attack activists filming in the Forest of Orléans

On Saturday, 24 October 2026, the French conservationist Pierre Rigaux and his partner filmed a hound hunt in the Forest of Orléans near Bouzy-la-Forêt. Around sixty recreational hunters were out that day with the Rallye Fontainebleau hunt. Rigaux has published a 50-second video of the incident on social media.

What the video shows

According to the report by the regional broadcaster ICI Orléans, one recreational hunter can be seen physically assaulting Rigaux's partner while she films with a small camera. She shouts at him to stop, saying he is hitting her. Rigaux is lying on the ground, three men are standing around him, and one is trying to wrench the phone from his hands.

Rigaux describes the sequence of events as follows: they had come peacefully to document the horses, the hounds and the practice of the hunt. They were attacked immediately, brought to the ground and beaten. The phones were attached to their wrists with straps, yet the master of the hunt tore at them with all his strength. His device has since disappeared. According to ICI, a complaint has been filed for aggravated theft committed by a group.

The hunt's defence

Matthieu Payet-Godel, head of the Rallye Fontainebleau, admitted to ICI that tempers quickly flared. Rigaux, however, had thrown himself to the ground and was playing the victim. He denies having snatched the phone from Rigaux. If it has gone missing, he said, perhaps it is still lying in the forest. ICI, however, identifies the man who reaches for the phone in the video as Payet-Godel.

His justification: the real violence is not the scene in the video, but what Rigaux has been doing for two years. He names names on social media, films the hunts and holds his phone under the noses of the recreational hunters. The incident, he claims, was the consequence of these provocations.

Blaming the victim as a method

The claim that filming is the real violence shifts responsibility for physical assaults onto those who document them. As early as June, in Orléans, three recreational hunters were convicted of attempted theft as a group for trying to snatch Rigaux's phone in the same forest in November 2024. What was punished back then was the grab for the phone, not the filming. The new incident shows that this lesson has not got through to parts of the hunting parties.

The rest of the defence does not hold up either. Payet-Godel stresses that in four out of five cases no animal is killed at all. In doing so, he reduces the question of animal suffering to the moment of the kill and ignores the pursuit that precedes it. This is precisely where the criticism lies: a study commissioned by the British National Trust and carried out by Patrick Bateson and Elizabeth Bradshaw (1997) found severe physiological stress in red deer hunted with packs of hounds. The National Trust subsequently banned stag hunting on its land. Nor does the reference to slaughterhouses and the Feast of the Sacrifice refute the criticism of hunting with hounds. The fact that non-human animals suffer elsewhere does not justify a leisure pursuit whose very core is the chase.

A pattern, not an isolated case

A report published on 11 November 2025 had already parliamentary inquiry describes serious accusations against the same hunting party. According to the account given by the member of parliament Ersilia Soudais, Rigaux was struck on 21 October 2025 with, among other things, a rider's knee, a whip handle and a riding helmet, and received an elbow blow to the face. The inquiry cites a medically certified three-day «incapacité totale de travail» (ITT), a haematoma on the nose and rib pain. Rigaux filed three complaints. On 4 November 2025, the Rallye Fontainebleau, as a guest in the forest of Rambouillet, is alleged to have obstructed filming activists once again.

Soudais is calling on the Ministry of the Environment to dissolve the hunting party. She points to repeated attacks on peaceful observers, to chases along forest tracks and roads, and to stray and injured dogs. At the time of the inquiry, a petition by the organisation Nos Viventia calling for its dissolution had, according to Soudais, more than 62,000 signatures. The member of parliament also cites a 2025 IFOP survey in which 72 per cent of respondents favoured a ban on hunting with hounds.

Why documentation remains indispensable

In Germany, hunting wild animals with hounds to exhaustion has been banned for decades (Section 19 of the Federal Hunting Act). In France it continues, and anyone who makes it public risks being attacked. The Orléans case shows why documenting such hunts remains important: the footage makes visible what those involved later portray differently. The attempt to cast Rigaux as the actual perpetrator of violence does not change the attacks described by ICI or the grab for his phone.