The Dangers of Recreational Hunting: A Call to Protect Wildlife in Italy

Hunting is a privilege granted to a minority of citizens and should be strictly regulated so that it causes no harm to wildlife fauna.

Now there are moves to establish recreational hunting as a right that should even take precedence over nature conservation, explains Loris Lanzanova, animal welfare advocate. It is true that Law 157 would need to be updated, but not in the way Lollobrigida envisions – who happens to be a hobby hunter himself. Species whose populations are in decline must be removed from the list of huntable species, lead must be banned from ammunition – yet instead of addressing the environmental issues, this proposal simply removes the few remaining restrictions on hobby hunters: hunting in snow, at night, in February (but in practice, thanks to a trick by the hunting industry, year-round), in state-owned areas, and the reduction of protected zones. All to the benefit of the hobby hunters – a greedy, arrogant and hypocritical lobby – with a minister who finds himself in a conflict of interest.

Giorgia Meloni erklärt den Wildtieren den Krieg

Anna Giordano, a long-standing campaigner against falcon poaching at the Strait of Messina, and Emanuele Biggi, naturalist and well-known presenter of Geo&Geo, highlight the importance of protecting mountain passes which, despite a legal requirement in place since 1992, have never been placed under protection. Now that judges have finally ordered Lombardy and Veneto to impose hunting bans on the “bird highways,” the government is intervening with full force to eliminate the requirement.

There is no shortage of interventions in favor of ISPRA (the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research), the ‘overly independent’ scientific institute that hobby hunters have always sought to bring under their control (and have practically succeeded in doing so), nor of the irony of Barbascura X, a naturalist and publicist in the Italian media, who reminds us that the government, instead of addressing the increase of penalties for poaching that have been frozen for 32 years, is busy punishing those who protest against hunting with a new criminal offense.

“This is the hallmark of the current government,” animal welfare advocates conclude, “silencing science, punishing dissent, handing over the commons to the most powerful lobbies, and harassing the weakest — in this case, wildlife. We cannot allow this.”