“Helpless Animals”
The LAV (Anti-Vivisection League) has released a note stating the association's opposition to the plan control of nutria in Liguria. This is the point of view: "The plan provides for the killing of animals with firearms, compressed air and even in gas chambers, without numerical limits, a real extermination decided by the Region against defenseless animals, guilty only of wanting to live. The Region has not substantially placed limits on the tools and periods in which to kill these animals, originally from South America and introduced into our country at the beginning of the last century by the fur industry. An industry that over the years has made a golden business on their skin and then got rid of them, releasing them on the territory, when fur became an out of fashion garment".
Points of view
Massimo Vitturi, head of the League's wildlife area, added: "It is unacceptable that millions of coypus are killed every year because they are accused of causing damage to the banks, while the furriers who introduced them to our territory are not asked to account for the damage they have caused by exploiting those animals. Coypus have no responsibility, they only adopt behaviors necessary to guarantee their survival. It is their exploitation, having considered them as objects from which to make a profit that has determined the current situation".
Alternative solutions
The LAV note concludes as follows: “Instead of wasting time and money to cruelly kill thousands of animals, we ask the Liguria Region to identify bloodless methods of numerical control of coypus, it is in fact the same European Regulation, cited by the Region to justify the adoption of the coypus-killing plan, which provides for the use of non-lethal methods”.