For the opening of the 2026/27 season, France’s top hobby hunter stages defiance and pride in tradition. Behind it lies a worldview that declares killing for pleasure and nature its private property.
Editorial team Wild beim Wild — 14 September 2026
Willy Schraen and the opening: pride in killing
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For the opening of the French hobby hunting season 2026/27, Willy Schraen, president of the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (FNC), addressed hobby hunters and French society in a video message on 13 September 2026.
His central appeal: “Be proud to be hobby hunters.” And with emphasis: “We will not be intimidated. We will give up neither our territories, nor our traditions, nor our rights.” It is the familiar battle cry of France’s top hobby hunter directed at all who question the killing of wild animals for leisure.
The vocabulary is no accident with Schraen. “We answer caricatures with facts, provocations with our cool composure, and attacks with our unity,” he called out to his followers. Pride, tradition, rights, calmness. It stages hobby hunting as an endangered cultural asset that must be defended against alleged attacks. Specifically, Schraen took aim at Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who had called on people to head into the forests and fields for the opening. But if one takes stock of Schraen’s statements over the years, it becomes clear what this pride is actually built on: the normalisation of killing as pleasure, a claim of ownership over nature, and the devaluation of any ecological criticism. It is worth looking behind the slogans.
“I enjoy killing animals”
Unlike most officials who hide their actions behind terms such as “wildlife management”, “service to nature” or “conservation”, Schraen once spoke the core truth himself. In August 2020, upon the publication of his book “Un chasseur en campagne”, he answered on the channel CNews when asked whether pursuing and killing gave him pleasure: “The answer is yes. I enjoy killing animals as part of hunting.” Killing was “not violent at all”. One did not need to hunt to feed oneself, he admitted, but it was “a great pleasure”.
This candour is revealing. It names precisely the motive that has long been at the centre of the critical debate on hobby hunting: the pleasure of killing. Schraen himself supplies the refutation of his own justification. Anyone who admits that food is not the reason has already settled the nutrition question themselves. What remains is the pleasure of pursuit, the shot, and the death of a sentient being. We have examined this self-revelation in detail here: “I enjoy killing animals”: What hobby hunting conceals.
It is also telling how Schraen frames his message on safety. “Not shooting is also an act of hunting,” he cautioned at the opening. The sentence is meant to sound prudent, but it reveals the underlying attitude: the shot is the norm, restraint the laudable exception.
“Nature does not belong to everyone”
A striking claim of ownership is part of Willy Schraen’s self-image. When walkers said they felt unsafe encountering armed hobby hunters during the season, he coolly recommended they go for walks “at home” instead. His statement “Nature does not belong to everyone” earned him a wave of outrage, mockery from the animal welfare organisation PETA, and the label “Trump of the trigger” from the director of the French bird protection league.
Listen closely: according to this logic, it is not the people who want to move through the forest unarmed who have a right to nature, but those who come with a rifle. Anyone bothered by the sight of a hobby hunter should stay home. Walkers, families and cyclists appear as disruptive factors, while armed hobby hunters are meant to pursue their “passion” on the very same land. The public conflict is simply turned on its head: it is not the one who kills who must justify themselves, but the one who wants to move about freely and safely. Schraen repeated exactly this reversal at the 2026 opening, when he described not armed hunting but an MP’s call to protest as an “irresponsible call for confrontation”.
The enemy is called “ecology”
Schraen’s rhetoric thrives on an enemy image. For him, nature conservation becomes “écologie punitive”, punitive ecology. Anyone who calls for refuge areas for wild animals after extreme events is, in his view, pursuing “the ideology of eco-warriors who understand nothing about it”. Thus he dismissed as “ridiculous” the call to close fire-damaged areas to hobby hunting, even though Portugal has taken exactly this step and the data contradicts him. We have documented the case here: Forest fires and hobby hunting: what Portugal regulates and France does not.
At the 2026 opening, Schraen refined this strategy: “We counter ideology with science,” he proclaimed, calling on hobby hunters to document their kills in order to have “objective data” to use against political decisions. What sounds like objectivity is in fact a claim to authority: it is not independent research that should judge the state of wildlife populations, but the figures of those who themselves carry the rifle.
The same pattern appears with lead in hunting ammunition. When the EU postponed the ban by years, Schraen celebrated this as a victory of “rural realities” over an allegedly out-of-touch Commission. That an alliance of hobby hunting associations and the ammunition industry stood behind this dilution went unmentioned in his account. Yet lead is not a matter of taste, but a highly toxic heavy metal that harms birds of prey, scavengers and entire ecosystems. Read more here: Lead in hunting: how politics, lobbying and transitional periods keep a poison alive.
How much this defence of the toxic is part of the association’s self-presentation was also shown by Schraen in the dispute over glue traps: when France followed an EU directive and restricted this cruel bird-trapping method, he declared himself “completely opposed” and threatened lawsuits, in the name of people “with strong values, who take pleasure in catching a few birds”.
The wolf as enemy image
How far Schraen’s thinking extends is shown by his stance on the wolf. At the FNC congress in Deauville in March 2026, he sided with those who no longer wish to tolerate the predator. According to the hunting-friendly portal “Chasses Éternelles”, he took the argument to its extreme: in certain zones, the wolf was no longer compatible with the priority of pastoral farming, and there one must be able to eliminate the entire pack. As a model of efficiency, he cited, of all places, Switzerland.
Behind the animal, for Schraen, there is always a worldview: man as master, deciding which species may exist where. The wolf is merely the visible enemy image. The logic behind it affects all wild animals that stand in the way of hobby hunting’s grasp, from the fox to the crow to waterfowl.
A pride without foundation
The call for “cool composure” at the season opening is therefore more than a mere phrase. Cool composure is precisely the attitude needed to pursue and kill a living being without natural inhibition taking hold, and to then regard this as a source of pride. Empathy towards animals is not a sign of naivety but a moral capacity. Repeated habituation to violence can dull this empathy. Anyone who suppresses it in the name of tradition, ownership or “passion” makes killing socially acceptable, even though it is necessary neither for nutrition nor for a responsible experience of nature. We examine this psychological dimension of hobby hunting in greater depth in our dossier Psychology & hunting.
Schraen celebrates precisely this shift as a virtue. His «pride» is not pride in nature conservation or responsibility, but the pride of a lobby defending its social authority to define what is acceptable: the right to kill wild animals as a leisure activity, and to fend off criticism of this as an attack on tradition and rural identity. The most honest statement this man makes remains the one about the pleasure of killing. Everything else – tradition, territory, rights and supposed composure – is political stage-dressing.
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