Finally the season began, and for some time we all forgot that while the hunters practiced the healthy passion of all time, some looking for hares and pheasants, some wild boars or roe deer, some thrushes or ... mind you ... larks, some black grouses and even ptarmigans, elsewhere, very well paid and in comfortable public offices, they worked hard, studying how to make the hunting world pay again.
The opportunity was there, greedy, not to be missed: the new regional law! Mutilated as we were by the foolish decision to repeal regional law 70/96 (canceled in order not to dispute a referendum that we would have won big time) without immediately replacing it with another new and modern one, we all lived for a few seasons in the limbo of unconscious hope that the same rules that elsewhere allow a normal exercise of hunting were also valid for us; and then, in the absence of the regional instrument, the 157/92 provision was applied, certainly more permissive than the defunct 70/96.
The party is now over, and the task of producing the new legislative system destined to last for years, alas, has really fallen to an administration that is not very friendly to hunters, and perhaps even unprepared to deal with such a delicate matter, which combines our interests with those of the agricultural world and the environment. The document that will determine the future of hunting in Piedmont was finally produced, and the bill passed a few weeks ago, but it is not what we have worked on too, called to propose and rarely listened to: we would have liked it to be very different. .
Now the legal process will begin, and the draft can still be corrected, amended or modified, but you can already see what the underlying texture of the fabric is, with articles inserted without a precise organic design, patched up, as if they were a colorful patchwork , a copy-paste made using other people's material and adapting it to one's own political needs, unclear and certainly penalizing for the hunting world. Some "poisoned meatballs" scattered here and there, only capable of leading to the extinction of the species in a few years ... Piedmontese hunter, or at least transforming it into a beefy selecontroller, with a rifle always calibrated and ready to electrocute every wild boar dare to approach fields and cultivated in our Region. Only this seems to interest them gentlemen!
Oh no dear friends, hunting is not this, it is quite another, and Federcaccia Piemonte wants to defend the rights of all practitioners, not only those who like the councilor or his friends, but also of those who want to wear out the soles of boots for hunting at three thousand meters, of others who love the migratory and would like to try their hand at it, of those who enjoy even just seeing the actions of their dog.
Just as the bill was being presented, in the same building and with a deadly and shameful coup (other "hunters" have called it a blitz, and curiously they are the very ones who had previously supported them, and now they may have repented, indeed ... arch-pentiti!), which also smacks of cowardice, passed an amendment to the law voted by a very large majority (or, again as those others write, by ... an enlarged majority!) and which prohibits the hunting of ptarmigan, variable hare and lark.
This is just the anticipation of what could happen in the near future with a law that, right now, would deliver blank delegation to councilor and councilor, putting them in a position to prohibit one more species at each new season, giving it to animal rights activists. and thus emptying the hunting activity compared to that known and practiced by generations of Piedmontese.
A real disaster, but we certainly will not sit idle, even if we have to present other appeals, or bring Piedmontese hunters to the streets. Nor should we be silent about the clumsy but very dangerous attempt to sideline the hunters from the management of ATC and CA by merging immediately, and before this happens with the new law, the management committees. They say it is to contain costs, saving money in a difficult time for regional finances, but we wonder which ones, given that participation in the "cdg" is free of charge.
However, what still eludes us, and therefore we would like it to be explained clearly, is how much the Region has spent, public money is of course understood, to resist in vain the three appeals to the TAR that have always seen them unsuccessful. We only know what it cost us, but it was hunters 'money, not taxpayers' money, and we think that those resources should have been destined for something more useful, perhaps precisely to pay for those agricultural damages that we hunters already reimburse in full; we specify: this happens only after the Region has transferred to ATC and CA the… eurini collected with the regional tax before the opening by the almost 25.000 subalpine enthusiasts.
Hunting is passion, we wrote it at the beginning, but at this rate in Piedmont it could soon vanish, together with a beautiful piece of history, culture and centuries-old traditions. We will ensure that this does not happen, again next year.
Happy 2016 to all of you and your families, and may it also be a harbinger of hunting satisfactions. Despite them! Federcaccia Piemonte
(December 14, 2015)
Hunting Federation