Posted by

Joe Gray

It’s the evening of 3 November 2016, and the journalist John Laurenson is informing listeners to BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight of a population in serious decline in France. Following year-on-year decreases, he explains, numbers have fallen to roughly half of what they had been thirty years earlier.

The population to which Laurenson is referring is participants in hunting and trapping (hereafter, just hunting): “an old French tra...