In the history of humanity… Mr Yves Lecocq, Secretary General of the Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation of the EU, is not pleased. He is unhappy because I included hunting among the "forms of violence" that have accompanied the history of humanity (see this section in our bulletin of 20 April). However, I believe that this is a misunderstanding. Over millennia, hunting has for a long-time been both for food and for the protection of human groupings, and that it implies a certain form of aggressiveness towards several animal species. However, hunting has been the first area where the different manifestations of human aggressiveness to which civilisation imposed rigorous rules of behaviour, by introducing the principal of fair competition with the hunted animals, and by trying to eliminate any form of hatred. I speak as a lay person, but I do not ignore the fact that several hunters, far from being blood thirsty brutes, often have ties of respect and sometimes affection with animals, and in general love and protect nature.

Man is not proud. Hunting not being my topic today when it is a question of the need that, in a Europe without war, the aggressiveness against the enemy - imposed on youths over the history of civilisation, but often regulated over centuries, art bears witness to this, from Homer until the "Great Illusion" of Jean Renoir, via Aristotle, Cervantes and many others - be channelled and sublimated thanks to sport. If we wanted to broaden the discourse between man and animals, there would be things to be said, and not all honourable for humanity Far from it, certain forms of rearing and slaughter, certain forms of live animal transportation or practices of vivisection and animal experimentation are incomparably more cruel that any form of hunting, still regulated and submitted to sever rules. The sight, these last few weeks, of mountains of animal carcasses destroyed in the context of the fight against BSE and against the foot and mouth outbreak raise many questions, for example over the validity of the reasons (purely economic) that have brought the European authorities of dismiss, for several years, the vaccination option. Why, in summary, has this section kept quite over this carnage? For a simple reason: the animals in question where either way destined for a large part to the slaughter, either to be slaughtered, or to have their throats cut (for the Muslim consumers). Our civilisation rightly protects wild species, but as soon as the number of individuals in a species exceeds a given level, the authorities are forces to authorise the elimination of the surplus. In nature itself, for each animal species, beyond a given density, problems of habitat, available food and health present themselves. Even the pigeons from our squares and cities must be maintained below a certain number. Nature has always known regulatory mechanisms, sometimes cruel. Today, it is necessary to recognise that man mainly causes the breaking of the ecological balance.

The time may have come for an objective thought process over the relations to be set between man and animals, by overcoming ignorance and demagogy, as well as the emotive reactions and thus superficial that too often characterise the stances we presently see. It is a difficult and delicate task, as man should be aware of the fact that the specificity of its development over millennia, compared to other representatives of the animal kingdom, does not give it all the rights. (F.R.)