A questionable article
On Saturday 11 November, a full-page article entitled "Doubles in the sights - Big crackdown on poaching - Complaints are pouring in" appeared in the Giornale di Vicenza on pages 14 and 15. From the tone of the article, published without giving space to any type of cross-examination, it would seem that all of a sudden the Veneto and in particular the Vicenza area had become a den of poachers or potential criminals. The reality is very different from that described in the newspaper article. The anti-poaching operation of DEAF (Anti-Poaching and Animal Crimes Operational Section) takes the form, in the vast majority of cases, of complaints against honest citizens with an average age ranging between seventy and eighty years old, in possession of a regular gun license hunting use and the psychophysical requirements to be able to carry out hunting activities.
The reason for the complaints
Why were these honest citizens denounced by SOARDA? They were reported for being forced to purchase their live decoys from farms at authorized retailers, given that for years the relevant institutions have not activated the capture systems required by state law no. 157/92. The authorized resellers have issued to unsuspecting buyers in good faith a regular payment receipt with a regular certificate certifying the legitimate origin of the live recalls. Can honest citizens who, in absolute good faith and upon issuing regular documentation, regularly purchase their decoys from authorized retailers be defined as "poachers" for this reason? It is hypothesized that some of these retailers have counterfeited or altered the irremovable rings affixed to the decoy birds and the related documentation of origin before selling the live decoys to unsuspecting buyers.
Crime hypothesis
Without prejudice to the fact that this hypothesis of a crime against these retailers, which for some of them has already been advanced on at least a dozen other occasions but never proven, would in any case lead to a conviction for the retailers who committed such crimes, a fault which certainly cannot fall on the heads of honest citizens who have regularly purchased their decoys in absolute good faith. If I, an honest citizen, regularly go to buy goods at the supermarket and then someone discovers that those goods had previously been stolen from another supermarket, should I perhaps be indicted for having purchased those goods in good faith from the supermarket that gave them to me? sold upon regular payment with the release of specific documentation? Here are the prevalent crime hypotheses attributed to many honest citizens who are then passed off in the press as hardened poachers. Another type of crime is that relating to the exercise of hunting activities within precarious hunting posts provided for by art. 20-ter of regional law n. 50/93, a law which was approved by the Veneto Regional Council, examined and approved by the Council of Ministers and the Constitutional Court.
Suddenly…the minutes!
Some control bodies, after this law was applied and respected without any problem from 2015 onwards, surprisingly this year are starting to raise reports, the same control bodies that have applied it for the last eight years without any moves disputes or raised any minutes. It comes naturally to ask: if these control bodies only started issuing reports in 2023 despite this law coming into force in 2015, have they committed omissions in official acts from 2015 to 2023 or are they now committing abuses in acts office? We believe that for the first or second hypothesis they should answer for their actions to the relevant authorities. This is what constitutes the vast majority of complaints raised in recent weeks against honest "A" citizens with perfectly clean criminal records who are therefore publicly treated as poachers or potential criminals. Our hunters are not drug traffickers or members of the various criminal organizations operating in the area, towards which attention should be paid and the use of large deployments of men and vehicles used in these periods to hunt down honest people who are exercising their Passion in compliance with the law (Hon. Sergio Berlato – Italian Member of the European Parliament and National President of the Association for Rural Culture).