Short answer. The hunter's legal possession of a wild animal exists only while it is actually under their control, so once it truly escapes that control, their possession ends. The statute does not explicitly say the animal becomes yours, but it stops treating the original hunter as still possessing it.
What the law says
Wild animals are possessed only while they are under one's control
Civil Code, Article 560 — Possession Of Animals. Read the full provision →
Possession of a wild animal depends entirely on control
Article 560 ties possession of a wild animal directly to control — a hunter or captor possesses the animal only for as long as they actually have it under their control. This is different from how ownership of many other things works, where losing physical hold of an item does not necessarily mean losing the legal right to it, since a wild animal's nature makes continuous control the deciding factor instead.
What happens the moment control is genuinely lost
Once a wild animal genuinely escapes — meaning the hunter no longer has real control over it, not merely a momentary loss of sight or a brief chase — Article 560 stops recognizing that person as its possessor. The article's wording focuses entirely on the fact of control; it does not preserve a lapsed possession just because someone was pursuing the animal moments earlier.
What Article 560 does not say about your land
The article settles when the original hunter's possession ends; it does not itself say that the animal automatically becomes yours simply because it crossed onto your land. What it implies is that the animal is no longer legally possessed by anyone once control is lost, until someone — potentially you — takes it under their own control in turn, at which point that new control would be what establishes possession. That mechanism has a name: Article 713 makes animals that are the object of hunting, being appropriable by nature and without an owner once uncontrolled, acquirable by occupation. So if you are the one who takes the escaped animal under your own control, occupation — not simply the animal crossing onto your land — is what could make it yours.
The domesticated-animal exception does not apply here
Article 560 draws a line between wild animals and tamed ones that have the habit of returning to their owner's premises — those are treated as domestic rather than wild for this purpose. A genuinely wild animal being hunted does not fall into that category, so the control-based rule, not any habit-of-return exception, is what governs an animal that escapes while being hunted, even if it had previously been captive.
This sits alongside hunting and wildlife regulation
Article 560's possession rule does not operate in a vacuum. Article 715 provides that the right to hunt is regulated by special laws, so wildlife statutes, closed seasons, protected-species rules, and permit requirements sit on top of this Civil Code framework and can restrict or condition who may lawfully take a wild animal in the first place, regardless of whose land it ends up on.