The news of the request by the mayors of Elba, presented at the meeting of the Community on park of the Tuscan Archipelago, with on the agenda the discussion on the situation of ungulates on the island of Elba, the overcoming and relative cancellation of areas suitable for wild boar hunting in the form of the hunt on the island. In our opinion this is certainly not the way to go to get coupons management results on the wild boar species, and that the idea of overcoming the suitable areas with the simultaneous demonization of hunting in pursuit does not lead to any decisive result for the current problems.
In this regard, we asked Dr. Federico Morimando, Wildlife Technician, Doctor of Natural Sciences and Research Doctor in Zoology, has been collaborating for years with the Tuscan Institutions and ATCs: "The request of the Community of the Tuscan Archipelago Park is evidently the result of a growing and unhealed exasperation, relating to the management of the wild boar species on the island of Elba. The reality of the island of Elba sees the two fronts of the conservation of the Park Authority and that of the ATC hunting wildlife management opposed, in a paradigm that is typical of many Italian realities, but whose picture is aggravated by the insularity, in which obviously populations increasing of wild ungulates they find themselves in a naturally confined and limited environment. Why are wild boars growing in numbers?
Is it the Park's fault? I would say no because the Park of the Tuscan Archipelago has been implementing for years a precise and careful numerical control activity through captures and selective collection (which among other things are complementary and integrate, taking mainly young cages and selective collection of adult animals). It is the fault ofATC? I would say no because the teams in the assigned areas assigned collect on average 80% of the shot down: almost 100 wild boars killed in the Tuscany Region in 2016 over 80 were shot down with the hunted method by hunting teams and about 20 with selection and control.
So it is simply wrong or, if we want to mislead, to speak of blame or to attribute a blame to a sector or an organization rather than another (unless there are obvious or macroscopic flaws or management gaps). The Boar phenomenon, today, is a natural phenomenon (certainly induced and favored by man since the 50s and 60s of the last century) which by now has taken on a European continental dimension and is driven by ecological factors of enormous importance, such as the constant increase in uncultivated and forested areas (almost 587 thousand hectares of new woods have been added to our territory in 10 years) and by climate change that with increasingly mild winters favors the increase of wild ungulates.
So how does it come out? Collaboration between organizations and adaptive management of the species (monitoring the populations and acting with all the appropriate forms of sampling suitable for the individual environmental realities) are the answers to be put in place that are certainly not decisive: because a definitive and decisive solution, we must have the intellectual honesty to tell us, does not exist. The challenge of the Park Authorities and of the ATC is therefore to collaborate and understand that the conservation of wildlife cannot be separated from the management of the natural and human resources that exist in a territory and that therefore apply conservation criteria for wildlife management it can sometimes or often mean having to take wild animals or control them numerically with full knowledge of the facts and, above all, of socio-economic effects. "