Occitanie: Two killed at wild boar hunts, trial in December
Within ten days, two people have been shot dead at wild boar hunts in southern France. According to the public prosecutor, the 65-year-old walker in Cassagnas had done nothing wrong.
Illustrative image. Photo: Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps / Unsplash
What Begins at the High Seat
In southern France, two people have been killed by gunshots at wild boar hunts within ten days. In the Lozère the victim was a walker, in the Gard a participant in a driven hunt. The recreational hunter who fired the shot in the Lozère must answer to the criminal court in Mende in December.
Cassagnas: “Something moved in the ferns”
On Sunday 18 October, a 65-year-old walker was shot dead during a wild boar hunt in Cassagnas in the Lozère département. The shooter, a 50-year-old recreational hunter, was hunting with his brother-in-law on his own land. According to the Mende public prosecutor, he saw “something moving in the ferns”, took it for a wild boar and fired immediately. The victim suffered two cardiac arrests and could not be saved despite a helicopter deployment.
The walker was not on the shooter's land. The public prosecutor expressly stated that he had committed no act of carelessness (So Chasse). The recreational hunter admitted in police custody to having fired the shot; alcohol and drug tests came back negative. Since Thursday 22 October he has been under judicial supervision and must answer to the Tribunal correctionnel in Mende in December 2026, as ICI Gard Lozère.
The charge is involuntary manslaughter during a hunting activity through breach of a duty of care or safety. In the case of an obviously deliberate breach of a specific safety obligation, the French penal code provides for up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros. Until a verdict is reached, the presumption of innocence applies.
Saint-Étienne-des-Sorts: participant fatally shot
Ten days later, on Wednesday 28 October, a 66-year-old recreational hunter from Vénéjan died in Saint-Étienne-des-Sorts in the Gard department, near Pont-Saint-Esprit, during a driven wild boar hunt with around ten participants. "One hunter fired and hit another participant," writes Objectif Sud. An emergency medical team that arrived by helicopter was unable to save him.
According to the ICI two hunters were taken into police custody; the investigation is being led by the public prosecutor in Nîmes. It is being conducted by the Pont-Saint-Esprit gendarmerie together with the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), as 6Medias reports, citing Midi Libre. The aim is to establish who fired the fatal shot and under what circumstances.
The pattern behind the "accidents"
Both cases follow a familiar pattern: in wild boar hunting, rifles are fired in difficult, poorly visible terrain, and in the Cassagnas case, immediately at a movement rather than at a clearly identified target. The case also shows that those struck include people who have nothing to do with hunting and who behave correctly. Wild beim Wild has described the risks of such hunts in the article "Risk Forest" and in the dossier Driven hunt.
How differently such deaths are judged publicly is shown in the article "Recreational hunters die: mourning. Joggers die: their own fault". How accident figures in Europe are embellished is documented in "The Great Hunting Lie". Further cases can be found in the dossier Hunting accidents and in the section Crime & hunting.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
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