The Region intervenes on the fox control plan by eliminating the hunting of this animal from the 2024-2025 hunting calendar. These are some of the requests to the council by Giulia Gibertoni (mixed group) contained in a question presented to the Region. The leader of the Misto group asks to verify whether, as happens in the province of Piacenza, «the forecast of killing 200 fox specimens per year, in addition to the hundred or so heads killed in hunting activities, is not advantageous and protection only for hunters, who see the fox as an annoying competitor”. The councilor then asks to «completely rethink the fox control plan in Emilia-Romagna, referred to in the resolution of the Emilia-Romagna Regional Council of 5 January 2024, n. 196, the last of the control plans which produced, from 2007 to 2023, the killing of 41,089 foxes, with an annual average of 2,417 foxes killed. This is in consideration of the precious regulatory activity carried out by the fox towards other animal species.”
Furthermore, Gibertoni wants to know whether the Region «does not deem it appropriate, starting from the next hunting calendar 2024-2025, to at least eliminate fox hunting, already subjected to a very heavy control plan, or at least reduce it significantly, in parallel with a consistent and real decrease in the maximum number of fox individuals expected to be killed each year”. Finally, the group leader turns to the council and asks “if it is not considered necessary to completely eliminate the possibility of fox hunting in dens, a legacy of the unworthy past of a civilized country”.
The councilor recalls that on 1 June, in Piacenza, a demonstration took place against the control plan launched by the Province of Piacenza which, in fact, implements the regional fox control plan in the provincial territory and which provides for the killing of 200 fox specimens per year. From 2008 to 2018, 1,541 foxes were killed, writes Gibertoni, and zero between 2019 and 2022, while in 2023 ten specimens were killed. And the 2024-2028 regional control plan also envisages, in the province of Piacenza, «the hunting of foxes in dens, as in previous years, despite this practice being a cruel massacre, with the help of other animals, under the supervision Human”. Throughout the region – recalls the councilor – “from the 2011-2012 hunting season to the 2021-2022 hunting season”, 8,271 foxes were killed, with an average of 752 foxes killed for each hunting year”. Finally, the opinion is cited of Ispra on the Plan which subordinates hunting to certain requirements, excluding cultivated land and providing for the hunting of specimens on banks and embankments only in the case of hydraulic risks”.
Giulia Gibertoni concludes. «The killing of over 60 thousand fox specimens in a twenty-year period is a useless massacre and has no convincing reasons. While, in fact, the damage caused by the fox is substantially minimal, if not non-existent, and in any case not estimated quantitatively, on the contrary the damage to the ecosystem resulting from the loss of a species that carries out a valuable regulatory activity towards other animal species, are confirmed.”
