In just the month of October in France, a 67-year-old woman died in Brittany, a 33-year-old mother and her two children were shot in the legs in the Rhône region, and a 62-year-old mushroom picker was shot in the abdomen and had to be helicoptered to Marseille.
The link between these gruesome incidents? They were all caused by careless hunters.
All the more timely, then, is the French Senate’s report released in September, which called for a ban on alcohol and narcotics while hunting alongside for a spate of measures similar to those applied to drink-driving. On 25 October, the government released a policy roadmap comprising some of these suggestions, including restrictions on drinking. “Hunting involves an arm. Like driving, it is not compatible with a high blood-alcohol concentration,” the secretary of state for ecology, Bérangère Couillard, said. The Elysee is now awaiting to hear feedback from hunting federations with the view to formulating decrees by early 2023 at the latest.
The president of France’s National Hunters’ Federation (FNC), Willy Schraen, has retorted that “a drunk guy on a bike is dangerous, too”, apparently forgetting French drink-driving laws also apply to cyclists.
The French hunting chief’s remark would not hold water in other countries, where representative organisations advise hunters to abstain from alcohol. Absent an EU-wide legislation on the matter, national legislation in states such as Spain, Belgium and Germany restrict drinking while in possession of a firearm. Or take, for example, the official website of a US agency for hunting education, which states that
“consuming alcohol before or during the hunt increases the risk of incidents because it impairs coordination, hearing, vision, communication, and judgement”.
This may seem like common-sense advice, but alcohol is still integral to the world of hunting, both in France and farther afield.
Hunting while drunk
In the United States, where the general population consumes 20% less alcohol than in France, a recent survey carried out on a representative sample of 2,349 young adults found that 23% of male hunters had at some point hunted while inebriated.
And in France? Although there is an absence of hard data, the Senate report tentatively ventures that a “small minority” of people have hunted while under the influence of alcohol. However, the senators offer more precise statistics regarding deaths and serious accidents in hunting, 9% of which are attributable to a hunter’s state of inebriation.
Unfortunately, the report ignores most international data available on the topic, failing to mention that in the US, drunkenness is involved in 15% of hunting accidents. Also overlooked is an extensive Danish study of 1,800 hunters, which revealed the risk of firearm-related accidents was directly proportional to the hunters’ alcohol intake.
Moreover, the recent Senate report does not clarify how alcohol significantly…
La suite est à lire sur: theconversation.com
Auteur: Laurent Bègue-Shankland, Addictologue, Professeur de psychologie sociale, membre de l’Institut universitaire de France (IUF), directeur de la MSH Alpes (CNRS/UGA), Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
