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Another senseless hunting accident


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"France is in shock" well I can't find any mention in the main French newspapers and I don't remember seeing anything on the national news either. Seems Canadians know more about what is going on in France than the French.

Seriously though it is very sad but as AnOther quite rightly points out the particular examples show gross stupidity on various peoples behalf. I mean as well as the chap who shot a 6 year old accompanying a hunt (min legal age 15 according to the article) what is a 82 year old deaf man doing wondering round a forest with a gun?

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It did make the radio news, but I didn't see it elsewhere. I'm finding the hunt-lark increasingly tiresome. Our local mob used to be very considerate - the previous president is our only neighbour and he used to rule with a rod of iron.

But he retired due to age, along with most of the committee.

Now they are run by a right bunch of, well, cowboys. They've managed to get themselves excluded from about half the land in the commune because of their lax behaviour around livestock in general and horses in particular.

There's now only two of the big farms whose owners are active members of the hunt and only another couple who continue to tolerate them. Other than that they can access to communal lands but these are getting very crowded of a weekend and I fear that it is only a matter of time before natural selection thins out their numbers.

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I am all for letting them continue unhindered, after all they seem to be doing a good job of thinning out their numbers, if you ban la chasse there will be more of them to breed.

Thankfully the vast majority of fatalities are amongst the chasseurs and not the public enjoying the countryside.

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Well fortunately it is not the UK where H&S ensures everyone is wrapped in cotton wool and unable to experience many elements of life.

I don't have a problem with hunting in general, it has been going on since humans populated the earth but then so has stupidity, humans and stupidity seem to run in tandem at times and is often intrinsically linked.

Most are possibly the same as me with regards to hunting and where they live. I know the days they hunt, I know the specific areas in which they hunt so I don't go in those areas on hunt days.

Out of the 30 on average that get killed by hunters every year I wonder how many are hunters and how many are just members of the public? I also wonder how many people in France get killed or maimed by drivers who either have no driving licence, no insurance or both? I suspect it may be many more than those who are shot given that there could be as many as 2.5m people driving in France with no licence. I am more concerned when I see an English registered car with a French CT sticker driving around where I live than hunters given that the former are only kidding themselves they have insurance. If anyone is going to be hit by one of these cars it will be me or a member of my family.

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I understand where your coming from Quillan. Although, I think a lot of people drive around with no insurance because they can't afford it, or more to the point, would rather spend the money on something else.

I doubt there are many people who get in a car with the intention of killing something though, whereas walking out of the door with a loaded rifle tends to lead you to the conclusion that something is going to get it.

I read somewhere (can't remember where now) that a proportion of hunting "accidents" are not really accidents at all, just payback for village grudges. You put a loaded rifle in a pastis'd up Frenchman with his blood up then there is no wonder there are "accidents"

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Driving a car that is not insured is (as I understand it) a criminal offence in France although I did read the penalty is not that high unless your reason for not having insurance is that it is to expensive in which case the fine, to you, would be quite high. I have no idea how they deal with uninsured drivers in France when there is an accident and if there is a 'pot' to cover damages.

I am not trying to stick up for hunters but I do think there are a certain amount of myths about them that probably grow every time they are told and sad to say probably more so by the English in France amongst their fellow English

Our local hunters are out at the crack of dawn or just before. I have seen them stop for breakfast and I have seen them drinking half a glass, if that, of red wine. When I have seen them drink more it is at the end of the hunt especially if they manage to kill a boar, usually when they are 'cleaning' the carcass. It is a bit smelly so I guess I can understand the reason. It seems that in the time I have been here that this small drop of red wine has now become a bottle or two of Pastis.

I heard a story about a PD who was 'accidently' shot many, many, years by hunters from our village but it was told to me by an English chap. As my French has improved I did some years back ask one of the hunters I know if it was true and he told me that no PD had ever been shot by accident or otherwise. Likewise a chap I go mushroom hunting with lost his cousin in a hunting accident again many years ago. The chap also hunted at that time although not in the same area as his cousin (i.e. he was not there when it happened) and since the accident has never hunted again, he does not even fish now.

In the article it mentions the deaf 82 year old. Well reading the following article and then visiting the website mentioned I see that the licence, which is not easy to get, has to be renewed annually and that you must be fit and not have any disabilities. I would class deafness as a disability so I don't know if that person was hunting legally just like a driver driving a car with no licence or insurance.

http://riviera.angloinfo.com/information/lifestyle/sports-and-leisure/hunting/

Most sports and leasure activities (think of the woman who died recently out walking) can be dangerous but none of those taking part do so with the intent of injuring or killing another human being let alone themselves. I mean how many people get run over and killed by cars etc every year?

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I am very much with Q on this issue - and equally I am not a hunter myself.

Perhaps our locality creates well behaved hunters and certainly alcohol consumption would be likely to lead a hunter to be 30m from where he expected if he took a wrong step.

Our hunters perform some very important pest control functions - mainly foxes but also some boar - and their activities probably ensure that deer do not become a problem in the forests.

As for 30 hunter deaths being the basis for a ban on activities, how does that stack up against 5000 road deaths? or 50000 smoking related deaths? or... I could go on and on.
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[quote user="andyh4"]Our hunters perform some very important pest control functions - mainly foxes [/quote]

See now I lived in a village in the UK where there was a 'hunt'. The hunters would claim they are doing the farmers a favour killing foxes and that they were doing valuable 'work'. Forgetting the cruelty angle I thought this was total BS. What they really liked doing was turning up, dressing up, lording it up over the farmers, spending the afternoon in the pub (sometimes with free booze as the landlord was a member) and generally being a nuisance.

They and their 'followers' often blocked off country lanes (illegally) with their cars making it impossible to get anywhere not to mention a load of horses charging out of a field right in front of you with no thought for motorists. I mean they are riding horses and there is a country code about passing horses but not for horses jumping out in front of you yet you got abuse thrown at you just the same. Most farmers I knew shot foxes so my argument was don't lie, it is nothing to do with actually hunting foxes it is just an excuse to have, in their mind, a 'jolly good bash'. A French friend once said that he thought the British very strange hunting and eating "Les renards" and when I explained they don't eat them he said "why hunt them then if you don't eat them?". Personally I think that is the difference between French and English hunters, the French hunters hunt to eat, well round here anyway.

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Interesting the word you used (in the nicest way) "tenderhearted".

One thing I have noticed in France is that the French are not English (should I really be saying British?) which to some I think comes as a supprise. [;-)]

What I meant by that is the French have different values and different perspectives to us. One of my French friends has a few dogs. One is a pet and lives in his family house (one of those horrible toy poodle type things). It is loved by the family and when its predecessor died a year or two back the whole family were inconsolable for many weeks, the chap used to cry quite openly when anyone mentioned his pet dog. The other dogs are hunt dogs and they are treated quite different. They are housed outside in kennels with a big 'run' in all weathers. These dogs are for doing a job, a bit like sheep dogs you see on farms in the UK (and France come to that) although they don't keep them in kennels all the time. They are clearly not pets and not part of the family.

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I had wondered what a PD was too. 

It is a term in french that horrifies me, as I always heard it used for homosexual men whereas I would have thought that pédé actually meant paedophile and that is a plain wrong and terrible insinuation.

It's bad enough in english that the lovely word 'gay', has been half inched to describe homosexuals these days, so it has lost it's original general usuage, but at least 'gay' is a pleasant word.

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[quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"]It did make the radio news, but I didn't see it elsewhere. I'm finding the hunt-lark increasingly tiresome. Our local mob used to be very considerate - the previous president is our only neighbour and he used to rule with a rod of iron.

But he retired due to age, along with most of the committee.

Now they are run by a right bunch of, well, cowboys. They've managed to get themselves excluded from about half the land in the commune because of their lax behaviour around livestock in general and horses in particular.

There's now only two of the big farms whose owners are active members of the hunt and only another couple who continue to tolerate them. Other than that they can access to communal lands but these are getting very crowded of a weekend and I fear that it is only a matter of time before natural selection thins out their numbers.

[/quote]

And so it continues. A couple of days a ago, the owner of the stables were we ride and where our horse is quartered was surprised to find a man with a gun wandering around the paddock that houses the mare next to ours. This horse is both pregnant and is prone to get agitated, particularly around people she doesn't know. To get to this point, our hunter mast have passed at least two electric fences and numerous signs pointing out that this was private property and that hunting was forbidden - the place is properly registered with the departmental chasse committee as being off-limits.

The stable owner photographed the man (apparently you can do this without people's permission when you believe a crime is in progress and solely for the purposes of evidence) before challenging him. Bloke claimed he was quite within his rights because "he was following a hare." By this time he was only 50m from a house. The gendarmerie, it seems, are unamused.

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In the old days when we used to read paper backed books with the authors name on, we were on the beach. Our two boys were agitated and amused at the same time. We asked why. They pointed to the detective novel my wife was reading. Non the wiser, we asked what the problem was with the PD James novel she was reading.

Up till then we had never heard of the expression either. One wonders what other errors we have inoccently made.
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Not really a topic for Christmas morning but I needed something to pass the time and while away my insomnia, and I have been wondering why English uses pedophile and French uses pédéraste (as does Polish, I found out some years ago...and, I suspect, many other languages). Turns out that the former implies a sexual attraction to children, and the latter defines someone who has sex with children.

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Betty said:

'Not really a topic for Christmas morning but I needed something to pass the time and while away my insomnia, and I have been wondering why English uses pedophile and French uses pédéraste'

Think you will find English English uses paedophile as opposed to US English where spelling proves a problem for the Americans and they 'mis'spell it the way you have quoted.
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[url]http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2012/10/05/angry-mobs-still-unable-to-spell-paedophile/[/url]

This would have nothing to do with the fact that most spellchecks seem to unilaterally revert to American English whether we want them to do so or not.

Thanks for the correction. Next time I'm up at 4 a.m., I'll try to pay more attention. :-)

Luckily, I spelled pédéraste right, and I seem to be the first on this thread to manage that!

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