Eduardo was talking to me quite a while ago now about Sunday mornings. He told me the restaurant had to be open at some ungodly hour for the hunters to get their breakfasts. Hunting is big in Spain. In season you can hear the shotguns going off from dawn to dusk and the abandonment of the hunting dogs when the season is over is a Spanish scandal.
This morning, on a local Facebook community page, someone was asking about hunting. I thought they wanted to do some but when I re-read the post they were asking if the hunters would be a problem if they bought a rural house. Pet dogs slaughtered in error, hunters walking across their land - that sort of thing. Anyway it piqued my interest because I guessed that going hunting in Spain might be a paper heavy undertaking.
First of all you have to be over 14, over 16 in Galicia, and, if you're under 18 you'll normally need permission from your parents, guardians or carers. Then you have to pass the hunting exam which is set by each Autonomous Community. Once it's passed it's passed though. It's not a recurring test.
Next, each season you have to get a hunting licence for the region or regions where you intend to hunt. The licence is for a named person so it's non-transferable. There is a multi community licence available. If you intend to go armed you need a firearms certificate. There are different certificates and presumably different procedures for getting licenced for the guns suitable for small game hunting (rabbits, hares, partridge and the like) or for larger animals (deer, boar etc.) Crossbows also need a licence though apparently longbows don't. It looks as though the licencing for those is a state licence administered by the Guardia Civil. It's the firearms certificate that requires a health test which has to be done every so often dependant on your age. If you commit an offence or you break the rules your hunting licence or your firearms licence can be taken away. There are different procedures, and different licences, for hunting with birds of prey! Hunters need civil liability Insurance and without insurance all the other licences lose their validity.
With the exam passed, the licences bought, your guns (or raptors) licenced and everything insured you then need somewhere to hunt. All over Spain you see the little square signs divided by a diagonal line into two triangles, one black and one white. They delimit the coto - I suppose the English word would be hunting reserve though that sounds like an oxymoron to me. Anyway, to hunt you need to get authorisation from the owner of the coto. I'm pretty sure that I've heard that farmers often sell the hunting rights on their land to clubs and associations.
The article I used as the basis for this post from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation reminds hunters that they should always use legal methods for hunting which I presume rules out AK47s and hand grenades. Only animals listed as fair game in each region can be hunted. Hopefully then our cats are safe so long as the hunter's eyesight test is reasonably recent. There was also a general reminder that there are safety rules that have to be respected - for instance someone on the Facebook page that I mentioned above said that hunting within 500 metres of a house is not allowed and I presume there are other comparable rules and regulations. (This is apparently duff information; see the footnote). Then the hunting seasons have to be respected. I just had a look to see when that was but it's far more complicated than I expected. For instance, this year you can hunt rabbits with dogs from 19 July to 25 December but only on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and on regional and national holidays. On the other hand if you want to blow song thrushes out of the sky from a fixed position you'll have to hold your murderous instincts in check a little longer as the season doesn't start till 12 October and goes on till 6 December. You can't do that on Thursdays either - just Saturday, Sunday and regional and national holidays. Its the same start and finish dates and the same days for the lone hunter banging away at anything they find or a line of guns flushing out everything in front of them though hare and partridge have to be left alone after 8 November. No wonder they need to pass an exam! I suspect there will be a large section on noting the difference between rabbits, hares and chihuahuas and an even larger section on calendar use.
Oh, and I forgot all about hunting with dogs but without guns. And fishing. Pah!
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It's a couple of weeks after the original post. It's Sunday morning and there are hunters near our house. There is a comment on this piece which says that the commentator didn't know about the 500 metre rule. As I said I read that on the answers to the Facebook question that prompted me to write this post. Apparently it's wrong. It may have been 500 metres at some time but there is an entry about Hunting in the Official State Bulletin signed Francisco Franco in 1970 which sets the limits at 100 metres from villages and the like and 50 metres from individual houses. There is a more recent entry in that same Official Bulletin relating to Valencia which sets those limits at 200 metres from the edges of villages and 50 metres from isolated houses with prohibitions too on shooting close to roads and tracks. Sorry about that misinformation.
