Frank Zunino, Secretary General of AIW (Wilderness Italy), issued a statement on the boar problem. Here is his note: “The hunting season is about to close, but the hunters have actually already closed it to avoid killing too many wild boar females, many already pregnant in December (which speaks volumes about the purity of these animals! ). It may seem like one ethical choice for animal rights activists, but it's very, very hairy ethics! By not hunting anymore you avoid reducing the possibility of making big game bags next year! Unfortunately, to the detriment of the peasants and of all the damage that an excess of wild boars also creates to the environment and other species of fauna and flora.
But the absurd thing is the fact that animal welfare associations, while blaming too many wild boars on the fact that it was the hunting offices and organizations that released more or less hybrid and very prolific animals, blaming them, then they refuse to let the hunters solve the problem that, in fact, they created. And the other absurd is that the hunters are delighted with this veto! In practice, both categories are behaving badly, one for greed of game bag, the other for extreme animalism. And those who lose out are the farmers and the rare species of fauna and flora that only receive damage from the wild boar. Yet it would be easy to solve the problem. Authorize more killing, but also authorize farmers to do so instead of hunters, with or without a hunting permit, until the number of wild boars has returned to the extent established province by province by the authorities responsible for hunting control.
To give an example, in the Province of Savona at the end of the hunting season only less than half of the authorized wild boars had been killed: 28 thousand expected. Hunters cannot consider the natural environment as their own boar farm to ensure an annual meat production! Wild boar hunting is, or should be, also a sport, and a sport is also measured by its ethical quality. And one of the principles of an ethical hunt must be the emotional satisfaction of those who practice it and not the quantity of it embodied prey (as unfortunately it is almost always for the vast majority of hunters)! In conclusion, let the anti-hunting animal activists stop proposing theoretical, expensive and often inapplicable or non-functional solutions to reduce the presence of wild boars and let the hunters solve the problem they created.
Hunters stop thinking only of bulking their game bag, and begin to think of an ethical hunt where the quantity of prey must not be the success or the pleasure of an "outing", but the pleasure and the emotions of the same, and to a healthy and true management of the fauna. And the authorities find ways to empower farmers to defend their products with special authorizations but also rules to be respected to ensure that the number of wild boars to be killed in a province during the hunting season can be completed, perhaps even with exceptions to the hunting period as is already done for the roe, and so for protected areas (absurd animal reservoirs whose numerical reduction is also necessary within their borders, rather than being considered off limits to balancing interventions also for the good of nature protected in them).