Presented at Senate with the participation of the Ministers of the Environment, Justice and Health, a bill that behind the screen of the greater animal protection shows all the animal rights and anti-hunt soul of the Grillino movement, clearly used in an electoral capacity. Recurrently some politicians, poor in ideas as much as in votes, feel the need to talk about themselves and remind their few voters that they still exist and sit - at least the few times they go there - on the seats of Parliament where, instead of worrying about the good of the country by addressing the many problems that concern it, they don't know how to do anything else but always play the same old records.
The same, however, also do certain parties that by sitting in the government that need to deal with urgent issues for the nation, they should feel it even more urgently and not engage in propaganda shots. The press conference that saw the Minister of the Environment Sergio Costa together with that of Health Giulia Grillo and of Justice Alfonso Bonafede to present the "ProteggiAnimali" bill (Amendments to the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Civil Code, as well as other provisions regarding the protection of animals) signed by Gianluca Perilli. In fact, we should not be told that it is accidental that a bill communicated to the presidency of the Senate on February 19th is presented by three Ministers of the Republic two weeks before the election date and announced with particular emphasis by Minister Costa himself from his Facebook page.
We do not deny that the Bill has parts that can be shared and indeed worthy of applause by the hunting world where it increases the penalties for condemnable practices such as the use of poisoned morsels or the killing of protected species or in a very serious state of risk of extinction, crimes against which hunting associations and hunters were the first several times publicly exposed and that every day contrast on the territory. Or the clearest sentence for the illegal trafficking of puppies, the fighting between animals, the abandonment or the useless violence and mistreatment to which they are still too often subjected, practices that no citizen can in any way justify. Without forgetting that hunters are the first to love and protect their dogs. But, and this is not surprising given the origin of the bill, what we strongly reject is the combination of regulated and sustainable hunting activity, which is the one practiced in our country, with the very concept of violence against animals that emerges both from some sentences pronounced during the press conference and from a reading of the article, where the exacerbation of some penalties related to hunting, already questionable, in addition to other minor restrictions, is the abolition of article 842 of the Civil Code is expressly provided for.
This obviously would put the entire plant on which it is built in crisis law 157/92 together with its historical social function. On the contrary, from what was stated in the press conference, it does not appear that the Bill is already assigned to the Justice Commission for its examination and frankly we hope that this will never happen with the current formulation. In any case, the Associations belonging to the Control room (Italian Federation of Hunting, Enalcaccia, AnuuMigratoristi, Arcicaccia, National Free Hunting Association, Italcaccia and the National Hunting and Nature Committee) will carefully follow its eventual process, ready to do everything legitimately allowed so that this too, like many others, there remains only the umpteenth electoral shot.