The President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano accepted the appeal of the WWF against the plan of the Province of Sondrio which provided for the opening of the hunt for the Alpine ibex, the chamois and the golden eagle.
The Province of Sondrio had proposed to open the hunt for currently protected species such as the ibex, the chamois and the golden eagle but the WWF had immediately lodged an appeal to the President of the Republic which in fact was accepted and the species in question will remain on the list. of those protected.
The ibex, now a symbol of the Alps, risked extinction until the last century but King Vittorio Emanuele II decided that the hunting of these ungulates was his own and that of his guests, while all other hunters were forbidden to hunt ibex.
In fact, the king gave precise orders to the gamekeepers of the royal hunting reserve of Valsavarenche, in Val d'Aosta, a territory that is currently part of the Gran Paradiso National Park, to protect ibex from unauthorized hunters.
The Alpine ibex population has an estimated total of about 31 thousand heads without restocking, that is, all descendants of the approximately 100 specimens that survived hunting at the beginning of the 1900s in the area of the Gran Paradiso National Park alone.
The eventual opening of ibex hunting in the province of Sondrio, according to WWF sources, would have compromised the survival of this species as the different colonies would no longer have had the possibility to move freely on the Alpine territory and consequently the possibility of mating between specimens of different populations, thus mixing their genetic patrimony and therefore increasing the chances of survival of the species.
According to the head of WWF Italy, Massimiliano Rocco, "The policy of management and conservation of protected fauna must be a serious and timely commitment on the part of the national authorities and must be promoted by the State, given that fauna knows no boundaries and is everyone's heritage, as this sentence confirms ”.
The WWF explains on the issue, "This sentence is also important for the motivation: the Province was deemed incompetent in the matter, given that it is only up to the Minister for Forestry Policies, in agreement with the Minister for the Environment, to arrange changes in the lists of huntable species: the ibex is a matter of national importance, exclusive competence of the State and it is not the Provinces that can arrange the hunting of the species to satisfy the appetites of Valtellina hunters ”.
Continuing the WWF explains that already in March 2009 "the Province of Sondrio approved a plan for the conservation, dissemination and management of the ibex, without Vas, without the participation of environmental associations, to launch, in disguise, a plan aimed at allowing the hunting of the ibex. This initially in the province of Sondrio, and then, in the event that the plan was passed, to extend the experience to the entire Alpine range ".
Finally, the environmentalists explain, “the WWF appealed to the President of the Republic back in 2009, filing three briefs during the proceedings. The Ministry for Agricultural Policies, which initially claimed that the WWF had no interest in acting, changed its mind after the WWF memorandum, admitting that the contested resolution refers to a document in which the methods for proper management of the species are defined in detail. (also from the point of view of hunting). AND now the Head of State has accepted the appeal Wwf ".