The association Arch Hunting recently sounded the alarm about the eradication of pheasants in theTuscan island of Pianosa. Several hunters would have been outraged by what is happening in the archipelago, in particular there are testimonies of massive culls of these specimens. Arci Caccia's no to the operation was therefore categorical, now the president of the National Park, Giampiero Sammuri, has responded to the criticism. The latter said he was surprised by the position, also because he expected a phone call for get explanations.
Here is what he said about it: “The primary function of a park is the conservation of nature or, in more modern terms, of biodiversity. In this context, not all animal species are the same: there are those that are on the verge of extinction, the threatened ones, the rare ones, the common ones, the invasive ones, the alien or allochthonous ones. It is true that there are some who give the same value to a pigeon, a herring gull, a nutria, the Marsican bear, or to come to the Tuscan archipelago to the shearwater or the Corsican gull, but Italian laws, European directives, international agreements and science they tell us that this is not the case.
Moreover, hunters should be quite expert in the different values of the species, given that for many years they have defined predators or opportunists (foxes, crows, birds of prey) that were systematically slaughtered as "harmful" “Safeguard” hares and pheasants which always had to be abundant to guarantee important game bags when the hunt opened ". Sammuri recalled how the pheasant is a species of little value for what concerns the conservation of biodiversity. The reason for the eradication lies instead in the reconstitution of an ecosystem as close as possible to natural conditions.