French Letter: Hares beware, it is almost hunting season

It’s August already. We seem to have skipped July. And the countryside around us is as wet and green as I have ever seen it. The animals don’t seem to mind, though. The other evening, for the third time in as many weeks, a huge hare lolloped into our back garden to feast on the clover that has taken over our lawn. 

He is a fine fellow, as big as a Jack Russell, and in-between nibbles he sits up and plucks at his whiskers. The neighbours’ cats would probably like to have a go at him, but I wouldn’t fancy their chances. 

Sadly, the outcome will most likely be very different if the local hunt gets him in their sights. The season in our area opens on September 19 and continues until the end of February. La Chasse is a thriving institution across France, allowing men – I’ve never seen a woman among them – to point their shotguns and rifles at just about anything that moves. 

Festooned in Day-Glo gilets-orange, they turn up in convoys of white vans, which they park wherever they like, before releasing their dogs and loading up their weapons. The afternoon is then punctuated by the crack of gunfire, sending the crows squawking up into the air and scattering La Chasse’s prey, which includes, as well as hares, rabbits, foxes, stoats, magpies, grouse, pheasant, wild boar and deer. 

There is no logic, it seems to me, behind what they do. They like to argue that they are playing their part in the natural cycle of country life – “controlling” the numbers of creatures bent on bankrupting farmers and stealing the produce of their neighbours’ vegetable patches.

All nonsense. The truth is, they just like killing animals, especially with guns. They also shoot each other, of course. During the last recorded season, 2019-2020, 131 hunters were wounded by their mates, eleven of them fatally. Some of those taking part are highly skilled, but many are rank amateurs who might as well be sent out with a blunderbuss. 

But the Chasse don’t only take risks with their own lives and the lives of others, they are arrogant with it. Anyone who stands up against them – as often as not English ex-pats – are challenged, with a risk of being ostracised by the local community. As far as the Chasse is concerned, they are only doing what comes naturally, and the more they do it, the better. 

Central to the pursuit of anything with fur or feathers is the Breton spaniel, a handsome dog, with long legs, said to be highly intelligent and superbly equipped for what they do. Their tails are cropped when they are pups, allegedly so that they won’t get in the way, which makes no sense to me. I suppose I could inquire at the Spaniel Museum in nearby Callac, a temple to the breed, established some years ago with help from both the commune and the Department. 

A friend of ours, who with his Spanish wife runs an excellent neighbourhood restaurant, moved to Brittany from the French Basque Country explicitly to indulge his love of this most prized of hunting dogs. He breeds and trains his animals before selling them off at a handsome profit to clients who value them not just for what is said to be their devotional nature, but for their deeply ingrained instincts. All I know is that from time to time, between September and March, if I am stupid enough to be out walking, I am liable to hear gunshots, followed by barking and then the emergence of a spaniel with a bird or rabbit in its jaws. What happens with wild boar, I can only imagine. They are said to give as good as they get. But I know whose side I’m on. 

It’s not that I’m a saboteur by nature. I like animals and wish them well, but I don’t obsess over them. I just can’t understand how a man can spot a deer standing innocently in the woods and immediately wish to shoot it dead. 

But that’s just me. Hares, by the way, are not a protected species in France, unlike in Germany and Switzerland. They are, however, declining in number, like just about every other creature that catches the hunters’ fancy. An estimated 900,000 hares are killed by the Chasse each year as well as half a million deer and around 300,000 boar. 

A neighbour of ours, a lovely man, who kept a pet rabbit in a drawer in his workshop, used to laugh at the idea of the English hunting foxes on horseback. He couldn’t understand it at all. Why didn’t they just shoot them? He called us over one day to watch him dispatch a family of stoats he had cornered next to where he kept his chickens. The mother stood over her young as if knowing what was about to happen. But we didn’t stay. We left him to it. As the shots rang out, we scurried indoors and pretended it wasn’t happening.