Prison sentences following fatal hunting accident in France
In southern France, a recreational hunter was sentenced to two years' probation and a lifetime hunting ban following a fatal hunting accident.
Two years' probation
Two years after a fatal hunting accident in southern France, a court on Thursday, 12 January 2023, sentenced the shooter to two years' probation and imposed a lifetime hunting ban on him.
The 35-year-old recreational hunter had confessed to having mistaken his victim for a wild boar. The leader of the driven hunt received an 18-month suspended sentence. He was also stripped of his hunting licence for five years.
The case had caused a great stir in France and reignited the debate over a tightening of hunting regulations. The 25-year-old Morgan Keane had been killed by a stray shot in a small village in the Lot département.
Brigitte Bardot criticises ‘President of the recreational hunters’
The shooter had obtained his hunting licence only a few months earlier and admitted to not having properly identified his target. The prosecution had demanded, for both defendants, suspended sentences alongside six months' imprisonment without probation, as well as a lifetime hunting ban.
France's foremost animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot referred to Emmanuel Macron in an open letter as the “President of the recreational hunters.” He was a “puppet of the hunting lobbyists,” in whose hands he was playing. Numerous environmental organisations and politicians in France had called for a hunting-free Sunday in order to reduce the number of hunting accidents. However, this proposal was not included in the government's 14-point plan.
Although the French, in view of several fatal accidents, are in favour of a ban, President Macron's government is not responding to it. A hunting-free Sunday would leave France “in ruins,” warned the recreational hunters' lobby. The Geneva model shows that professional wildlife management without recreational hunting works.
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More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
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.
