Today 1 December 2011 in Picinisco (Frosinone side of the Abruzzo National Park) a meeting will be held between the Park Authority, Municipalities and WWF to illustrate to shepherds and breeders the offer of electric fences to protect them from the damage they suffer from bears and wolves .
An excellent initiative that will certainly appeal to those who suffer damage, but which for the Park Authority, let's not hide it, is more aimed at avoiding paying out money to compensate them than to defend the bear.
This is because the initiative, beyond the apparent positive aspect, will indirectly not benefit, but damage to bears and wolves! This is an obvious fact that nobody says and nobody writes about! Is this the help that the Life Orso project will give to bear survival? Or will it not rather be given to the exhausted coffers of the Park Authority, with indirect damage to the bear?
The Italian Association for Wilderness therefore wishes to clarify that it fully shares the decision to offer free fences to shepherds and breeders capable of defending them from the aggression of predatory animals, and specifically from bears and wolves, but with one imperative condition: that money that the Park Authority (or the Life Bear Project) saves by failing to compensate for damages are used: one, to acquire "public" flocks to be grazed unprotected so that bears and wolves can prey on them freely; two, which are used to cultivate fields of corn, wheat, carrots, sainfoin and alfalfa. And finally, that the damages that shepherds and breeders, albeit in a reduced form, will continue to receive, are in any case promptly and fairly reimbursed.
Otherwise it will be necessary to recognize that the Life Bear Project, instead of favoring the protection of the bear, will contribute to making it move further away from the Park areas, towards flocks and cultivated fields that it will find only in areas outside its historical habitat.
And this can only mean an increase in the diaspora from which the population already suffers (with a consequent reduction in the birth rate) and increase the risk that poachers and / or hunters mistakenly kill them.
Wisdom sometimes needs simple thoughts, simple thoughts that most of the time need little expense, but of great practical sense. And to save the Marsican bear today a little more practical sense is needed than highly scientific research and high costs!
As a government of politicians has been replaced by a government of technicians, perhaps to save the Marsican bear it is the case that scientists and officials appointed by politics take over, at least with their advice, technicians and people with practical sense, perhaps simple park guards or former park ranger and, why not, also hunters and shepherds.
Frank Zunino
General Secretary of the AIW
Formerly a scholar of the Marsican Bear
always its protector and protector of its habitat
Source: Wilderness