Despite the strong protests of the animal rights world, the Senate gave the green light to an amendment that erases the ban on hunting within a radius of a thousand meters from the mountain passes. Fundamental natural corridors, crossed every year by millions of migratory birds on their journey through the Alps, thus transform into risk areas, just when animals are more vulnerable.
The same law, renamed “on the mountain“, It also opens up to the possibility of breaking down the wolves, establishing by decree a maximum roof of specimens to be killed annually. A measure that, in fact, questioned years of battles for the protection of a species already threatened by persecutions and poaching.
The Minister for Regional Affairs and Autonomies, Roberto Calderoli, presented the law as an intervention aimed at “recognize and promote the peculiarities of truly mountain areas, ensuring essential public rights and services such as school and healthcare“.
But in fact, two articles risk hitting wildlife directly, transforming a text designed to strengthen mountain territories into a dangerous precedent against biodiversity.
Mountain passes: bottlenecks for migration
The Alpine passengers are real migratory birds for migratory birds, which choose these areas because they are placed at lower altitudes than the surrounding peaks. Precisely for this reason they represent particularly delicate and crucial areas for the survival of species.
The 46 associations that mobilized against the amendment explain that the standard wanders the ban on hunting by establishing in some cross -protection areas (ZPS). Here the hunt would be prohibited only before 1 October, although it is known that most of the migrations, especially of the sparrows such as Turdidi, takes place between October and November.
To make the situation even more serious is the threshold of one thousand meters: only the passes above this quota fall into the expected protection. In Lombardy, for example, out of 475 passes identified by the TAR, about 110 are located below a thousand meters and, with this rule, they would remain completely excluded from any protection. The same would happen in many other regions of Italy, leaving hundreds of crucial passages for the migration of birds.
It is a very serious act – concludes Annamaria Procacci, ENPA wildlife office -. As legislators of the 157, and I was among them, we were fully aware of the importance of the passes for the protection of migratory birds and placed in article 21 the ban on hunting for a distance of a thousand meters from the passes themselves: a natural and dutiful measure, considering that the passes constitute a must, crossed by avifauna flows already very tested by long journeys. A kids game turn them into a massacre.
Sources: Department for Regional Affairs and Autonomies / ENPA
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