French municipality bans hobby hunting from communal land

After years of legal dispute, the southern French municipality of Le Lherm has succeeded in banning hobby hunting across all 56 hectares of its communal land, a step described by mayor Frédéric Pasian, who considers himself a pioneer of this decision in France, as unprecedented to date.

What happened in Le Lherm

The municipality of Le Lherm, south of Toulouse in the Occitanie region, has withdrawn its entire 56 hectares of communal land, including the Bois des Escoumes, from the hunting ground of the local hunting cooperative ACCA. This was made possible through Article L. 422-10 of the French Environmental Code, which allows landowners to remove all of their own plots from an ACCA hunting ground. The prefecture of the Haute-Garonne and the departmental hunting association validated the withdrawal. Mayor Frédéric Pasian, who had led the nearly three-year conflict, expressed satisfaction with the outcome to the «Dépêche du Midi» and described himself as a pioneer of this kind of decision in France.

A tough road with a failed first stage

The success was preceded by a first, failed stage. The municipality had earlier attempted to ban hunting in the Bois des Escoumes by municipal decree. This first decree was annulled in 2025. It was only the detour via Article L. 422-10, that is, the complete withdrawal of all municipal plots from the ACCA ground rather than a targeted ban for individual woodland areas, that ultimately led to the goal.

Assessment by the hunting association: less an exception than a precedent

The president of the Haute-Garonne departmental hunting association, Jean-Bernard Portet, plays down the exceptional nature of the decision. According to him, areas are withdrawn from hunting grounds every year in the department; this is everyday practice under hunting law. The real novelty lies solely in the fact that this time communal rather than private land is affected. Yet that is precisely where the political explosiveness lies: the Haute-Garonne counts around 20’000 hobby hunters as well as several dozen ACCA, which manage a large part of the huntable area in the department. A precedent on communal land could therefore, as noted in the «Midi Libre» article, serve as a model for further municipalities in the region to launch similar initiatives.

Assessment: A precedent with narrow limits

The Le Lherm case shows how laborious an exit from hobby hunting is where, unlike in the canton of Geneva, no democratic popular vote on a blanket ban is possible, but only an individual-rights detour via land ownership. Almost three years of legal dispute and an initially annulled decree stand in contrast to what the canton of Geneva achieved in 1974 in a single popular vote with a two-thirds majority: a complete, immediately effective hunting ban for an entire territory. Despite the legal success, Le Lherm remains an island of 56 hectares within a system that continues to treat hobby hunting as the assumed normal case and permits exceptions only via the detour of private property. Just as the Geneva model shows that professional, democratically legitimised wildlife management can sustain entire cantons, the dossier Geneva and the hunting ban on wildbeimwild.com documents this.