L214 unveils damning video on hunting game farming

The L214 association is attacking a breeding farm specializing in pheasants and partridges, which are released when hunting. What relaunch the debates, a few days after the viral video showing a deer tracked during a hunt with hounds.

On Wednesday September 23, 2020, the L214 association, which campaigns for better living conditions for farm animals, shared its latest survey. In this video, she is alarmed by the conditions of game rearing of the Gibovendée company, in Thouars (Deux-Sèvres). This farm specializes in birds destined to be hunted. Through images taken in June 2020 with a drone, the video highlights mass breeding."Birds in cages, restricted in their movement, endlessly bumping into the ceiling trying to fly away. Others, in huge buildings, are kept by the thousands without outside access.", reports the association's press release. According to the latter, the cages are cramped and the birds try to escape by bumping into the ceiling. All are also flanked by a device on the spout, to avoid attacks between them.

"In France, 14 million pheasants and 5 million partridges are reared each year. These birds unsuited to wild life are generally released during the hunting season. 80% of them die within 48 hours of the hunt. release: 30% do not survive in the wild, 50% are hunted ", adds L214.
Gibovendée management has indicated that it does not wish to comment until the video is released.

Anti-hunters on the lookout

This investigation has enough to fuel the anger of environmental and anti-hunting activists, on the war footing since the opening of the 2020 season. Already, Saturday, September 19, 2020, a deer pursued during a hunt with hounds, and which had taken refuge on a construction site, had made the news. The video of the scene had been posted on social networks by the AVA collective (Abolissons la Vénerie Today).

If these images arouse a legitimate emotion, they also question the interest of hunting, presented by its aficionados as beneficial for the environment (according to them, it would make it possible to regulate the populations of wild animals in our countryside). But according to calculations by Pierre Rigaux, a naturalist who collaborated with L214 for this new video, of the 20 million animals that are killed each year, three-quarters are wild, the remaining quarter coming from game farms. And by adding injured or unrecovered animals, the figure could more than double.

L214 unveils "the worst breeding" ever filmed

Video by Celine Peschard