Hunting and Fauna: Piacenza, the environmental associations Enpa, Wwf and Legambiente make an appeal to the Province to protect the population of Hares in the Piacenza area.
Hare alarm! But What Does The Province Do? We publish the appeal of the associations Enpa, Legambiente and WWF on the reduction of hares in the Piacenza area. The hares, animals that can be hunted by law, have been disappearing from our territory for at least a couple of years, last year the Province estimated a reduction of 3040% of animals compared to 2011 but this year the situation has further worsened, especially in the plains. Faced with such a serious wildlife alarm, well known both to hunting associations and to the provincial body, we would have expected the Province to adopt all those emergency measures that the hunting law but also common sense provides when a population of huntable animals becomes at risk of survival, and that is to close the hunt early and analyze the causes to understand how to intervene correctly on the situation.
Unfortunately, however, we must denounce that during the last hunting consultation held on 24 October precisely on the question of the reduction of the hare, despite our proposal to close on the third or 10 November, to save the last remaining hares, the councilor Ghilardelli proposed to anticipate the closure of the hare hunt by just one week, on October 17, as is done every year, ignoring the emergency and not intervening as required by law, to protect a species in serious suffering. In practice, we have chosen to favor a type of consumerist hunting where what matters is not to create a balance between the presence of animals and hunting, but to have animals always available to shoot at, to be bought back every year, in disregard for proper wildlife management. hunting of the territory.
The most surprising fact is that, in the face of a proven and dramatic reduction, certainly caused by several concomitant factors, which should be seriously sought, among which it is possible to hypothesize intensive agriculture, the reduction of suitable habitats and an excess of harvesting, the carrying out of an in-depth monitoring and study of the causes was not considered a priority and urgent in the Consulta, nor a management strategy hypothesis was presented to try to reverse the trend, preferring to solve the problem through the purchase of breeding hares and a plan of containment of the fox, indicated as the only scapegoat for the decrease of these animals.
The request we therefore make to the councilor and the council is that serious and correct hunting management be made in Piacenza, useful to all, by closing the hare hunt from next Sunday and preparing a long-term strategic plan to bring the hare back to the levels of few years ago. Investigate all the possible causes of animal decrease, preparing in collaboration with the Ausl analyzes aimed at establishing any chemical-sanitary and environmental causes and above all have the courage next year to further reduce the sampling times and the number of hares. huntable or to suspend hunting, as happens for the gray partridge, if necessary, since hunting, we remind you, is not a right, but a possibility granted by law only if certain conditions are met.
The solution to counteract the decrease in hares in the area certainly cannot be to buy imported animals to shoot every year as is already the case for the pheasant, or to find easy scapegoats to kill, such as foxes, but an effective finalized project. to the constitution of vital nuclei of populations. Given the situation, we also believe it is absolutely counterproductive this year to catch hares in the ZRC. Better to allow the very few surviving hares to be able to reproduce in a known territory, avoiding the stress of catches and transfers. The hares are animals, they cannot be considered exclusively "knockdown quantities".
Enpa (Burgio) Legambiente (Chiappa) Wwf (Soprani)
(November 8, 2013)
Source: PiacenzaSera