French animal rights groups push to ban Alpine marmot hunting amid climate concerns

Every September, as the Alpine marmots begin their frantic final weeks of feeding before hibernation, French hunters take to the mountains with their rifles. Around a thousand of the rodents—stocky, whiskered creatures belonging to the squirrel and groundhog family—are shot each year in what has long been treated as a legitimate part of the hunting calendar. But this autumn, animal rights campaigners are planning protests and petitions to end the practice, arguing that climate change has fundamentally altered the case for allowing the hunts to continue.

The marmot is not officially endangered in France. Yet the numbers are sliding. Scientists studying the animals in the Grande Sassière alpine nature reserve have documented something more insidious than simple population decline: the climate crisis is destabilizing the rigid social hierarchies that marmots depend on to survive. Christophe Bonenfant, a researcher at France's National Centre for Scientific Research, and his colleague Rébecca Garcia have observed marmot family groups fragmenting faster than before, with dominant animals being replaced more rapidly and females producing fewer pups. The animals are caught in a vicious cycle—their territorial battles growing more brutal as environmental stress fractures their social bonds, while smaller litters mean fewer young to replace those lost to violence or predation.

For Pauline di Nicolantonio, president of the Association for Justice for Savoie Animals, the moral question has become impossible to ignore. The marmot is woven into Alpine culture in ways that make the hunting season feel like a betrayal. Children across France grow up with marmot folk tales and poems—Goethe wrote one that Beethoven set to music. The creature is the mascot of ski resorts, the face of chocolate advertisements, a symbol of the mountains themselves. "When you tell people that hunting marmots is allowed in France, they are shocked," di Nicolantonio said. The gap between the marmot's cuddly public image and the reality of its brutal existence—dominated by infanticide and territorial murder—only deepens the contradiction of shooting them for sport.

Hunters and farmers defend the practice with different arguments. The National Hunters Federation insists the season is strictly regulated, lasting at most a month, and that the species shows no signs of genuine threat. French farmers claim marmots are pests, burrowing through fields and damaging machinery. Yet Bonenfant, the scientist, frames the real question differently. "It's not a species that raises questions about conservation," he said. "The root of the question is the morality of hunting animals, and why people enjoy killing animals for fun." The marmots do serve ecological functions—they are prey for eagles, foxes, and badgers, and their tunnel systems aerate the soil—but they are not classified as nuisances by conservation authorities.

The campaigners are looking to Italy, which banned marmot hunting in 1992, as a model for what France could do. Di Nicolantonio acknowledges the hunters' counterargument: that marmot populations appear robust in some areas, that hunting is a tradition, that the species is not yet formally protected. But she points to the worrying data on climate impacts and questions the science commissioned by hunters themselves to justify continued killing. "Hunting them is cruel, absurd and unpopular," she said, "but isn't banned because it's considered a tradition." The hunts begin in September, just weeks before the marmots slip into their five- to six-month hibernation, their bodies swollen to eight kilograms with stored fat. Whether those hibernating animals will wake to a France that still permits their hunting remains an open question.