Italy: Referendum on hunting abolition
More than 500,000 signatures were reported, but after verification too few valid ones remained. No vote was ever held.
The committee “Yes to abolishing recreational hunting” has announced that the required 500,000 signatures have been collected.
Recreational hunting, with all its misery, is to be banned once and for all in Italy. President Tony Curcio: “If all goes well, we will vote next spring.»
500,000 signatures reached
On Saturday 23 October 2021, the 500,000 signatures needed to start the process of validating the referendum question were reached. This milestone was set on 1 July 2021, when environmental and animal welfare activists decided to set out 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 submissions and then refer the matter to the Constitutional Court to review its constitutionality.
«We are happy to have achieved a goal of this magnitude; it was hard, but we did it.” That was how Tony Curcio commented on the news to fattoquotidiano.it.
«At the beginning we thought it would be easier to reach this point, but without proper media coverage we had to work through word of mouth alone, and things got complicated”, said the activist. Hence his “thank you 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” stressed, the referendum is not only 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 recreational hunters, and pets are affected even more often.» And that is not all, says Curcio: «We must also think about the pollution caused by lead from cartridges, which settles on the ground and in some cases seeps into the groundwater and contaminates it.»
This initiative is not the first of its kind. Another attempt to abolish recreational hunting was made in 1990, when the Radical Party, the Greens, the Communist Party, Democrazia Proletaria and various environmental associations proposed two referendums aimed at restricting the rules on recreational hunting and the access of recreational hunters to private land. Both failed, however, for lack of support.
Addendum: referendum failed because of invalid signatures (as of October 2026)
The vote never took place. In early December 2021, the Corte di Cassazione declared the referendum request inadmissible. According to the «Sì, aboliamo la caccia» committee, around 130,000 paper signatures and over 47,000 digital signatures were declared invalid, more than 177,000 in total. This left the campaign short of the required 500,000 valid signatures. The committee criticised that it had been blamed for failings on the part of the municipalities, and announced that it would continue the fight with a popular bill to revise hunting act 157/1992.
Today, developments are heading in the opposite direction: on 23 June 2026 the Senate passed the hunting reform DDL 1552, which expands recreational hunting; the bill is now pending in the Chamber of Deputies (Italy: Meloni's «Sparatutto» hunting act provokes EU dispute). More on the Hunting Act.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on the criticism of recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
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