Amici Federcacciatori in a few weeks the Piedmontese hunting season 2015/16 will end weaponry hunting will be placed in armored lockers, dogs will stay quiet in boxes and menageries and the Sundays of many enthusiasts will return to be a day of rest to be lived in peace, not those of the healthy passion that stirs the sleep of the eve of a day of hunting, accompanying us for almost three months a year.
This happens every December and for Federcaccia Piemonte it becomes a favorable opportunity to take stock, tell you all that has happened or what hasn't worked well, what is expected for the future; this is true for all of us and for those important events that normally cross life, such as family and loved ones, work or health, but it also applies to lighter things such as hunting, which, as we have already said, in fund is nothing but a passion and as such it should always be lived.
For this reason we would have liked to write about it with calmness, that sense of bitter-sweet that accompanies the last days of an exciting journey or a holiday that is ending; we would have liked to do it with the enthusiasm of someone who wants to make others participate in the experiences lived; we would have liked to tell you about it with an eye to the future, to the coming season, suggesting improvements for our business; we would have liked to do it in positive terms, because that is what you expect from us; we would have liked but, really, it was not possible.
We wrote it twelve months ago, in our informative circular "the new Piedmontese Hunter", sounding the alarm for the first absurd decisions of the council and councilor who have recently settled, but immediately able to stand out for their vigorous support for animal-environmentalist requests that in Piedmont they would always seem to find fertile ground, and some politician ready to ride them for shop interests, or to pay previous electoral debts.
It was with the closure of the ptarmigan and variable hare hunt that we bitterly understood what air was blowing in Piazza Castello: that of new prohibitions. We reacted and won in front of the TAR, but this was completely useless. We replied to the incredible stubbornness of the subalpine administrators, making a new appeal and in the spring we won again: two to zero therefore, and with the Region forced to pay part of the legal costs, but again the ball in the center and extra time because not even that result was accepted.
In fact, the 2015-16 hunting calendar had just come out, which no longer allowed those species to be taken, other than reopening as the Regional Administrative Court proposed; obviously the surprises for us were not limited to the halving of huntable species of the typical alpine fauna (activity, it must be remembered here, which has always been in the Piedmontese hunting traditions) because the councilor had given us a really ... respectable treatment: opening in October, and not on the third of September as required by law 157/92, no pre-opening, early closures, bags still reduced when they were already the poorest in Italy.
To this was added an incredible fact, to be told to posterity, which had never happened before in over forty years of the history of the Piedmont Region, a vulnus destined to create an irremediable rift in the relations between the parties: the failure to agree on the hunting calendar with the recognized hunting associations, those that represent the hunting world according to the Italian law, in force and applied everywhere except us, the Region that has… united Italy!
We were immediately reassured that before the opening of the season it would have been modified, improved, but we, still burned by the “ptarmigan” affair, asked for certainties, a written commitment from the commissioner and not just empty words. In response we received the usual promises, maybe, some who knows.
Some of the hunting associations wanted to believe him, putting themselves sideways and boycotting our initiatives, finally breaking up the unit painstakingly built the year before with the birth of the Piedmontese AAVV Coordination. Predictably, nothing came of it, and so in June we took action again, filing an appeal also on the calendar and unleashing the ire of Corso United States, which he replied with other incredible misconduct.
Same script, but also on that occasion we won ... by a wide margin, even if this time the Region could not ignore it and was forced to take note of it, due to the order of the Regional Administrative Court which required the modification of the document voted on April 13 . The lesson was very hard, hopefully enough. It wasn't like that!
We thought we had already seen everything, but that was just the appetizer of an indigestible lunch because from that day an "art-house balloon" of initiatives began, with meetings involving agricultural associations, environmentalist ones and a only hunting association, coincidentally the same one that for "political closeness", the famous party card in his pocket preferred to the hunting card, had felt compelled not to leave the commissioner alone, but in this way betraying the hunters, so much to deserve expulsion from the aforementioned AAVV Coordination.
The hunting calendar changed several times, we no longer even remember how many, with an impressive and even ridiculous frequency, as if every time we wanted to put the classic piece on it, always… worse than the hole it should have covered. Bad luck? Inability? Our wickedness? You decide a little.