Coldiretti’s Volunteer Hunting Guards take to the field to combat damage from wildlife. Their role will be to support the Provincial Police in targeted culling as provided for in article 52 of regional law 3/1994, where agricultural companies complain and report frequent devastation of their crops and agricultural production. The first team of Volunteer Hunting Guards promoted by Coldiretti Massa Carrara will be made up of the five members who passed the written and oral exam of suitability at the Lucca Territorial Office of the Tuscany Region (Alessio Basteri, Emanuela Bertilorenzi, Francesco Guadagnucci, Giacomo Fiori and Federico Lauro) but the prospect is to add others elements in the near future to make wildlife control interventions even more effective and timely. “First of all, I want to congratulate the five Volunteer Hunting Guards who passed the exam with merit, which was anything but obvious, by attending an evening course organized by our federation. – explains Francesca Ferrari, President of Coldiretti Massa Carrara – With With this tool we can concretely contribute to the control and containment activities of wildlife: the Volunteer Hunting Guards will be able to intervene directly, at any time of the day, under the coordination of the Provincial Police, to contain the emergency linked to damage related to wildlife It’s a tool that they didn’t have at their disposal before today and that we will now be able to use to provide answers to our farms and citizens.”
Wildlife represents the first critical issue for the agricultural world which costs companies thousands of euros every year of damage by discouraging cultivation in mountainous and more marginal lands with serious repercussions also for biodiversity maintenance and land erosion. But it is no longer just a problem for farmers. The disproportionate presence of wild boars in unsuitable (therefore agricultural) areas, estimated at five times higher, represents a danger for road safety with many accidents, including fatal ones every year caused by sudden crossings of urban and rural roads (at least a dozen of the most dangerous ones registered in Massa Carrara); furthermore, from a health point of view, with the arrival of Swine Fever in the province of Massa Carrara, of which wild boars are the main vectors, there is a risk of bringing the livestock farms active in Lunigiana to their knees. “We believed in this tool, having already experimented with the creation of groups of Volunteer Hunting Guards promoted by Coldiretti in Mugello and in other parts of Tuscany; the results obtained in the area were comforting with a significant decrease in damage to the production of agricultural companies – explains the President of Coldiretti Massa Carrara – The Volunteer Hunting Guards are an additional and localized tool to the extraordinary culling plans that we are asking for, they are a solution that we can implement to stop the invasion of wild boars in our agricultural crops. What we have been asking the institutions for a long time and we will do so forcefully again are rapid and effective interventions and extraordinary containment plans to guarantee safety in the countryside, but also in the cities. This for us represents one of the first emergencies highlighted by our members territorial meetings, there is no more time, we need to intervene immediately”.
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