"Fracas", in search of an opening with the hunt

The review of reviews. Seen from a distance, the cover would rather evoke a comic book magazine: illustration with "bright" flat tints, plump letters of the title, Fracas , which in fact announces itself as "the media of ecological struggles." For its third issue, this quarterly, created by three thirty-something journalists, formerly of the magazine Socialter , devotes its central section to a delicate question: "Are hunters with us?" To answer it, the magazine offers journalistic articles, in the hope of reconciling their convictions with the facts.

The whole thing first paints a picture of contemporary hunting in France. Its practitioners are aging (46% are retired) and still represent a mere million people (96.7% of whom are men). Hunting still constitutes one of the densest networks of sociability and influence in rural France, politically highly sought after: an expected, as well as essential, article summarizes the methods of the hunting lobby.

The boldest part of the dossier concerns the possible convergence between hunters and environmentalists. First, by giving a voice to those who contest the principled disqualification of hunting. Anthropologist Charles Stépanoff, a specialist in Siberian shamanism, thus proposes considering human beings as "empathetic predators."

For the economist Jacques Luzi, a member of the journal Ecologie & Politique , "the current challenge is to re-appropriate the relationship with death by accepting not only the idea of ​​dying, but also that living requires killing. (…) The question is not to kill or not to kill, but how we are going to kill." This type of argument will not sway the anti-speciesists, who will only see it as diversions of "carno-traitors."

Perhaps more persuasive, on a tactical level, is the article documenting, at the local level, fruitful alliances between environmentalists and hunters to defend a specific site against potentially devastating projects.

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