France: Hobby hunters compensate for wildlife damage
In France, hobby hunters must continue to pay for wildlife damage. A court dismissed the legal challenge against the compensation obligation.
On Thursday, 20 January 2022, the Constitutional Council ruled that hobby hunters must continue to compensate farmers for crop damage caused by wild boar, red deer, and roe deer.
The Council thus dismissed a legal challenge brought by the French hunting federation (FNC), which argued that the relevant legal provisions place a disproportionate burden on hobby hunters and violate the principle of equality.
Under the current rules, wildlife damage to farmers is compensated by the departmental hunting federations according to a fixed schedule once a certain threshold is exceeded. In the judges' assessment, the compensation for wildlife damage is directly linked to the hunting and wildlife management plans drawn up by the hunting federations and is therefore justified.
The hunting federation announced it would continue working toward a revision of the regulations. The system, conceived more than 50 years ago, was no longer economically viable. Given the "explosion" in wild boar populations, hobby hunters could no longer bear the costs of damage to agricultural crops on their own.
In 2019, according to media reports, a total of 79.87 million francs (77.3 million euros) was made available in France for the compensation of wildlife damage. Around 47.53 million francs (46 million euros) were paid out to farmers and just over 25.83 million francs (25 million euros) were spent on administrative costs, with the remainder going toward prevention measures.
The wild boar population in France has multiplied over recent decades, driven by milder winters and a style of hunting that for a long time was carried out in such a way as to [...] ensure the maintenance or even the growth of wildlife populations, according to a parliamentary report published in 2019.
This was followed by a rise in agricultural damage, particularly to maize, soft wheat, and meadows, leading Christiane Lambert, the chairwoman of France's largest agricultural union FNSEA, to publicly accuse recreational hunters in 2018 of not doing enough.
