The new sowing season appears and it specter of wild boars that devastate the fields is still there, intact from last year and previous years. Indeed, if possible, it is even more scary judging by the data on the reports of damage from wild boars that have come toATC (Territorial Hunting Area) of the province of Asti for the year 2021. Numbers that speak for themselves: on the territory of the ATC Nord Asti the bill presented by the farmers is of 342 thousand euros of which 325 thousand only for damage caused by wild boars. The remainder is divided between damage from corvids (about 10.500 euros), roe deer (4.600 euros, nutrie (1.400 euros) and minilepri for just 320 euros. The ATC Sud Astigiano is no better off, which has a total almost equal to the other ATC: 343 thousand euros with a preponderance of damage from roe deer (about 150 thousand euros), and then dormice (68 thousand euros), corvids (28 thousand euros) and 720 from pheasant.
Wild boar damage is also on the rise in the south: it has gone from about 75 reported in 2020 to over 96 in 2021. Adding up the North and South Atc, it is almost 700 thousand euros: not just a negative record, but double what was counted the previous year. The first bad news comes from the ATC president, Antonello Murgia: "If the other years we were able to anticipate all or at least part of the compensation payments by drawing on the shares of the badges and then settling with the contributions that were sent to us by the Region, this year we will no longer be able to do so, because we, all that money, we do not have them in the cashier". Therefore farmers will have to wait for the transfer from the Region.
The second bad news that comes from the president himself, is that he no longer relies so much on hunters as a solution to the proliferation of wild animals, wild boars in the first place. "Always starting from the assumption that hunters are not" employees "of the ATC or farmers, but carry out hunting for passion - says Murgia - they are not in sufficient numbers to guarantee effective killing to significantly reduce the pressure of the wild ». And, even in this case, the numbers come to the rescue of thought. «In the Province of Asti we have about 2 registered hunters - explains Murgia - divided fairly evenly between North and South. Of these, only half go wild boar hunting.
Compounding the increasingly scarce availability of hunters is the fact that every year we have an average retirement from hunting about fifty members (too old to continue hunting, failure to renew the license or, unfortunately, due to death). Those who remain have an average age ranging from 65 to 70 years. It is clear that, for a forested province like ours, there are too few. Just as there are few in the whole Piedmont Region. We are talking about 18-19 thousand hunters, as many as the province of Siena or Bergamo alone has ”. So doomed to succumb? "No, but we must pursue other paths besides hunting" concludes Murgia who relaunches the project for the sterilization of wild boars (Lanuovaprovincia.it).