Italy: Referendum to Abolish Hunting

The committee «Yes, to Abolishing Recreational Hunting» has announced that the required 500,000 signatures have been collected.

Recreational hunting, with all its suffering, is to be permanently banned in Italy. President Tony Curcio: «If all goes well, we will vote next spring.500,000 signatures reached»

500,000 signatures reached

On Saturday, 23 October 2021, the 500,000 signatures required to initiate the process of validating the referendum question were reached. This milestone was set on 1 July 2021, when organisations from environmental and animal welfare activists decided to embark on this journey to bring the issue back into the focus of public debate.

The ball is now in the court of the Court of Cassation, which must examine the validity of the requests and then refer the matter to the Constitutional Court for a review of its constitutionality.

««We are happy to have reached a goal of this magnitude — it was hard, but we made it.» This is how Tony Curcio commented on the news to fattoquotidiano.it.

««At the beginning we thought it would be easier to get to this point, but without proper media coverage we had to rely solely on word of mouth, and things got complicated», said the activist. Hence his «thanks to the more than 1,500 volunteers who contributed to this important result.»»

Not just an ethical question

As the president of the «Comitato Sì Aboliamo La Caccia» emphasised, the referendum is not solely about the ethical question of respect for animal life, but also about the other harm caused by recreational hunting: «Every year, many people are accidentally injured or killed by hobby hunters, and even more frequently pets are affected.» And not only that, says Curcio: «We must also consider the pollution caused by lead from cartridges, which settles on the ground and in some cases leaches into groundwater, contaminating it.»

This initiative is not the first of its kind. Another attempt to abolish hobby hunting was made in 1990, when the Radical Party, the Greens, the Communist Party, Democrazia Proletaria, and various ecological associations proposed two referendums aimed at restricting the regulations governing hobby hunting and hobby hunters' access to private land. Both failed, however, due to lack of support.