Ardennes: Thrush trapping with horsehair snares
In the northern French Ardennes, barely two hours' drive from Aachen, until autumn 2020, half a million horsehair snares were still standing in extensive moorland forests. The trapping method is both inventive and simple: a wafer-thin snare is made from horsehair (or nylon) and placed next to fresh rowan berries. If a bird attempted to take the bait, its neck would become caught in the snare, it gets frightened and tries to fly away. The snare closes and strangles the bird - the term ‘throttling’ comes from this hunting method, which is mainly used to catch thrushes. However, countless tits, robins and finches were also caught in the treacherous snares.
Around two thirds of the snares were positioned in trees, while the rest were set on the ground and caught countless mice, dormice and frogs as ‘collateral damage’.
Horsehair snares were once widespread throughout Europe, and birds were still caught using this method in Germany in the 19th century. Today, they are banned by the EU Birds Directive and all countries comply with it - only France brazenly ignored it for a long time and allowed the use of these cruel and unselective strangulation traps. Each of the 250 bird trappers in the Ardennes were authorised to set up 2,000 snares each.
The annual trapping quota was limited to 20,000 thrushes. In other words, with this huge effort, each trapper was only allowed to catch 80 birds during the two-month season during autumn, i.e. barely more than one bird a day on average. It's easy to imagine that more than one bird a day died in 2,000 snares! The requirements of the special licence were a waste of time. In fact, according to estimates by the Committee (CABS), well over 100,000 birds were caught with horsehair snares in the Ardennes in 2020 - including 20,000 to 30,000 protected animals.
The Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) organised a large-scale campaign against bird trapping in the Ardennes back in the 1990s. Tens of thousands of protest postcards were sent to Brussels and Paris, a dossier was submitted to the EU Commission and thousands of snares were destroyed on site together with committed members of the EU Parliament. So far without any significant success. The EU Commission failed with a complaint to the European Court of Justice - the French officials had submitted falsified expert reports confirming the selectivity of the snares!
Following legal action by our partner organisation LPO, the Supreme Court declared the trapping of songbirds with horsehair snares illegal in 2021 and 2022. Inspections by the Committee Against Bird Slaughter in November 2024 show that there are no longer any active trapping sites.
But there is still no reason to sound the all-clear, as the government in Paris seems to be looking for tricks to re-authorise bird trapping!