He was mistaken for a boar and died. A hunter’s shot left no escape for the dog Naïki, a six-year-old black-haired German shepherd who lived with his family in Coutevroult, in the French department of Seine-et-Marne. On Saturday, the four-legged was 800 meters from home, when suddenly a bullet hit him in the head, killing him. The hunters themselves would have called the gendarmerie following the incident, but the family, saddened and angry, filed a complaint and an investigation was opened into the incident.
A neighbor of the family said she saw the hunters pet the four-legged just half an hour before the incident. Indeed, a group of people regularly come to the area for jokes and usually knock on the doorbell of Naïki’s family to warn them to keep their pet safe. However, it seems that on the last Saturday they didn’t do it and so the worst happened. «The gendarmes warned us towards the end of the morning – said the owner -. The shooter said he confused the dog with a wild boar.”
The German shepherd’s family filed a complaint for “involuntary attempt on the life of a pet” and it seems that it was the hunters themselves who called the gendarmerie after the incident. With the owners of the victim, however, no one seems to have shown up: «We are in shock, Naïki was a member of our family – said his human friend again, who had taken the four-legged for his son -. Yet, no hunter has apologized to us. When will they stop shooting at anything? A dog is not like a boar! We had built our house here because it was a quiet place, but sometimes there is so much shooting that it feels like a war zone.” The same concern for the insistent hunting activity in the vicinity also afflicts the whole neighbourhood, which was closely tied to the pet killed on Saturday and which contacted the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, that of the famous actress, to “obtain justice”. A neighbor revealed that no one goes for walks in the nearby forest anymore for fear of being hurt or, worse, suffering the same fate as the dog.
Meanwhile, the French Biodiversity Office has opened an investigation and the director of the Seine-et-Marne hunting federation has assured that “if the culprit is a person in possession of a regular permit, he will be sanctioned on the basis of his mistake and to their responsibilities”. From the first investigations it seems that it was really a conventionally regulated hunting trip on private land and that that day visibility was limited due to the vegetation. The dog, walking alone near his home, would have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and his black coat would not have helped him to be distinguished from a wild boar, causing his death by gunshot .
