Ariège: demonstration in defense of hunting, facing the bear
(AFP) - 1 hour ago
FOIX - Some 7.000 people according to the organizers, 5.000 according to the police, demonstrated Saturday in Foix (Ariège) to defend hunting in this department, threatened according to them by the protection of different species like the bear, AFP noted.
Hunters from all over Ariège, but also from Aude, the Alps or the Saône-et-Loire, fishermen, hikers, farmers or even elected officials took to the streets in peace, to "defend whatever costs "the right to hunt, according to the president of the departmental federation of hunters of Ariège, Jean-Luc Fernandez.
At the end of the event, a delegation was received at the prefecture.
The summary judge of the Toulouse administrative court rendered a judgment at the end of September authorizing beaten hunting, but suspending those of two endangered species, the capercaillie and the rock ptarmigan. Above all, he asked the prefect to "define bear protection measures within one month".
The demonstrators carried signs reading "Long live the hunt", "No to the bear" or "My grandfather hunts, I want to hunt too", opposing any form of restriction on hunting in the mountains linked to the bear.
The hunters had remained neutral in the quarrel over the reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees.
But faced with the summary seizure of the administrative court by the Ariège ecological committee (CEA) to suspend the decree of June 10, 2009 opening the hunt because it "does not provide for any measure to protect the bear s' applying to driven hunting ", they decided to stand up against the opponents of the Slovenian bear releases.
"We know for whom rurality should no longer vote", launched Jean-Luc Fernandez, without citing the environmentalists, often qualified by the demonstrators as "fundamentalists" or "enlightened".
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