Valencia gives green light for 10,000 foxes to be hunted

Each year, hunters across the Comunitat Valenciana kill more than 10,000 foxes to help keep the countryside under control. But ecologists say the animal being wiped out is also the region’s best natural defence against the rabbit plague farmers are desperate to stop.

More than 10,000 foxes killed every year under current rules

Every year, hunters across the Comunitat Valenciana kill an average of 10,000 foxes, according to a report by GER-Ecologistes en Acció (GER-EA), part of Ecologistas en Acción, one of Spain’s largest environmental campaign groups, which studied two decades of hunting data between 2003 and 2023. Under the region’s current hunting order, foxes can be targeted during the media veda, Spain’s mid-season hunting period held in late summer, using driven hunts and ambush positions. In shared hunting zones, they can also be culled almost any time of year for what the rules call ‘control or management’, as long as local wildlife officials give permission.

Foxes act as a natural brake on rabbit numbers, ecologists say

The report’s authors argue that this level of hunting has no real scientific basis and is undermining one of the countryside’s own defences against overpopulated rabbits, one of the fox’s preferred prey. When rabbit numbers are low, foxes spread their diet across rodents, fruit, insects and carrion, allowing rabbit populations to recover. Once rabbits become abundant, however, foxes specialise in hunting them, acting as what the report calls a natural brake on the population boom.

Continuing to hunt or trap foxes below a critical population threshold risks destabilising the local ecosystem, the report warns, worsening the very pest problems and soil damage the culling is meant to prevent.

How Valencia’s rabbit problem keeps spreading

The scale of the problem has grown sharply. A rabbit-control order first drawn up in 2009 covered 70 municipalities. By August 2026 that list had expanded to 177, according to the Generalitat Valenciana. Farming union La Unió Llauradora i Ramadera puts the annual cost of crop damage from wild rabbits and boar at more than €55 million across the region. A similar dispute between farmers and conservationists over wildlife control has already played out in Cataluña this year, over the same native rabbit species now at the centre of Valencia’s row.

Conservationists demand an immediate hunting moratorium

GER-EA has formally asked the Generalitat Valenciana to declare an immediate moratorium on fox hunting in every municipality officially recognised as having a rabbit overpopulation problem. ‘It is contradictory and ineffective to spend significant public resources and farming effort combating rabbit plagues while systematically wiping out their main natural predator,’ the group said.

The report’s authors want the Generalitat to let fox numbers reach a natural threshold of between 1.5 and 2 animals per square kilometre in the worst-affected areas, calling it a genuine alternative to years of failed and endless artificial culls. They argue the region has a chance to modernise its hunting policy in line with 21st century EU biodiversity standards. The Generalitat has not yet said whether it will act on the request.