There will be no geolocation for hunters, just a reporting app

The government unveiled, on Monday January 9, 2023, its vast plan ” hunting safety ». Prohibition of the practice of hunting under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, establishment of compulsory training, and strengthening of penalties in the event of conviction are on the program. Among all these measures, one in particular caught our attention: the announcement of the creation of an app.

This is not really a surprise: the government had mentioned for the first time the use of an app after a fatal accident, at the beginning of the year 2022. The solution envisaged at the time is however different from that which has was finally presented on January 9: there will be no geolocation app, only a reporting service.

How will the app work?

In his press kitthe government specifies that it wishes ” develop a digital application in which hunting areas will be identified “. Since the no-hunting zones are very numerous, explains the document, “ each person will be able to identify a non-hunted area and go there, being sure not to come across a hunter.”

The app will centralize the information and will be in open data to ” facilitate exchanges with existing applications already used by the general public “. At last, “ the declaration of collective hunts will be mandatory and the government’s goal is to launch the app in the fall of 2023.

We do not yet know the name of the future app. An article from Le Figarowhich appeared a few days before taking it out of the government file, specified that it would be called ” meerkat “, the same name as an app already used by the Ministry of Sports to report problems encountered in the wild, but there is no mention of this app in the file.

Can it work?

There are still some gray areas — at the time of this article’s publication, the ministry had yet to respond to our questions. We do not know what will happen if hunters fail to fulfill their obligation and forget to declare a hunting zone, or if they overrun the indicated zone. In addition, the app only concerns collective hunts, not solitary hunts, and we do not know if measures will be taken for these specific cases.

Another question also arises on non-hunting areas. The latter are not very well defined within the framework of the app: will it be areas without hunting that day, or areas where the ban is total?

Areas without total hunting are not always known to the general public. These include, among others:

• Land located within a radius of 150 m around a dwelling,
• Grounds that have a continuous fence that hinders the passage of game,
• Private land of more than 20 hectares without the authorization of the owner,
• Hunting and wildlife reserves established by the prefect and in national hunting and wildlife reserves.

Finally, the most important question: will the app be enough to prevent accidents? Nothing is certain. There have already been similar apps locally in France for several years, and have not prevented accidents from happening. In the Côte-d’Or department, where Hunting Info informs users of the dates and places of driven hunts organized since 2021, an inebriated hunter nearly injured another in February 2022.

In Haute-Savoie, where Eco hunting has been available since 2016, and whose users can “ indicate the date and the municipality that interests them (or geolocate by GPS) », a walker was injured in October 2021.

It therefore appears that the success of the app will depend above all on compliance with security rules by hunters. However, as recalled the government report published in September 2022accidents ” are, for the very large majority, the result of human fault related to non-compliance with basic safety rules “, as ” failure to comply with essential safety rules during driven big game hunting, non-compliance with the shooting angle (30 degrees), poor handling of weapons, and shooting towards roads, houses or paths of hikes “. Not really behaviors that an app can change.