New Curbs Sought : Italy Begins Stalking the Wild Hunter

An American visitor to this serene medieval village north of Rome was shocked recently when he stepped out the front door of his host’s rural home and found a shotgun-armed hunter intently tracking one of the host family’s dachshunds across the lawn.

Later the same morning, just 20 feet from the obviously inhabited house, two loads of lead pellets splattered the leaves of a live oak where a songbird had been whistling moments before.

Throughout the day, a cacophony of popping sounds, some of them distant but many alarmingly close, echoed across the surrounding fields and the hills overlooking the normally placid Tiber River valley.

Drumbeat of Gunshots

To the residents of the area, this steady drumbeat of shotgun blasts and the occasional peril to family pets, not to mention songbirds, are unavoidable elements of country life in Italy.

For Italy’s hunters are out in force five days a week, from early autumn to early spring, armed with the legal right to intrude and shoot on virtually anyone’s property and to bag almost anything that runs or flies wild, including migratory songbirds.

But the wide-ranging freedoms of Italian cacciatori may soon be sharply curtailed or, if some of the anti-hunting forces have their way, ended altogether. A national coalition of political radicals and wildlife groups, including Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund, claim to have enough signatures on a petition to force a referendum that would abrogate the nation’s hunting laws.

New Laws Sought

Their aim, according to Roberto Smeraldi, secretary of Friends of the Earth and one of the main promoters of the referendum, is not to abolish the sport but merely to wipe the legal slate clean and write new and more restrictive hunting laws.

“Although some people are against hunting altogether--a survey recently showed 56% of those interviewed were opposed to hunting--we would aim to put very strong limitations on it, shortening the season and limiting the species that can be killed, because the number of hunters in Italy is far greater than in any other European country,” he said. “We figure there are 5.1 hunters for every square kilometer of available territory.”

A key section of the referendum would kill the article of the Italian civil code that allows hunters almost unrestricted rights to enter and shoot on private property. That provision has the hunters especially up in arms, because there are very few game-populated areas in Italy that are not on private property; a ban on legal trespass would effectively kill hunting as a sport.

But even among the most dedicated hunters, there is widespread support for tighter restrictions on what is fair game and how it can be bagged.

Move for Shorter Season

Gianni Luciolli, a spokesman for the Federation of Italian Hunters, said that most of the country’s approximately 1.2 million licensed hunters would be agreeable to a shorter shooting season and to restrictions that would bring Italy into line with other members of the European Communities.

“What we are waiting for is government approval of the directive for the protection of birds put out by the EC in 1979,” he said.

Under the European Communities’ guidelines, all endangered species and all migratory birds would be protected; present Italian regulations permit the killing of 36 species of birds, including migratory songbirds, Luciolli said.

The European Communities’ rules also prohibit the use of caged birds as decoys, commonly called “Judas birds” in Italy because they betray their own kind. Judas birds are widely used in Italy but not always as effectively as hunters might wish.

For example, Father John Navone, a Roman Catholic theologian in Rome, tells of a still unidentified hunter who spent an entire day carrying two singing Judas birds around the fields outside Lucca, Navone’s hometown. Left empty-handed and furious when no wild songbirds answered the decoys’ calls, the hunter drove into the town’s central plaza and fired both barrels of his shotgun at the pigeons clustered there. Townspeople and police were too startled to halt the disgruntled hunter before he drove away.

“Italian hunters have a bad reputation, perhaps because traditionally many have been poachers or sons of poachers,” said Luciolli. “But another problem is that their numbers have grown disproportionately over the last 40 years to the amount of game that is available--up from 400,000 to about 1.2 million.”

“You have to run the gantlet of a shooter every 100 yards or so,” grumbled James Buxton, an English journalist who longed for a taste of British rules when he was based in Italy. “In Britain, the right to shoot normally goes with the land; in Italy, a man can shoot wherever he wants.”

During an al fresco luncheon in a beautifully sculpted and clearly game-free private garden here last month, for example, two hunters clad in camouflage and holding shotguns at the ready led their excited dogs to within 25 yards of the crowded dining table.

Warned by the host that they were in violation of an Italian regulation prohibiting hunting within 150 yards of a house, the hunters reluctantly turned away, but only after arguing that the outdoor table was too far from the house for the rule to apply and that the guests, therefore, were eating out at their own considerable risk.

Mistaken for Wild Boar

While such behavior is rare, Italy does suffer its share of annual hunting accidents, just as do other countries where the sport is popular. According to news reports, three hunters died last week, one of them, Eugenio Capece, 31, of northeast Sardinia, shot in the head when a fellow shooter mistook him for a wild boar. The Hunters’ Assn. said that it has come to expect about 20 to 30 deaths a year, most of them from carelessness.

Even with careful stalking, however, there would appear from the anti-hunting groups’ estimates to be enough lead flying around to take a far greater toll. Smeraldi said that the nation’s hunters expend about 500 million shells annually and, in what would seem an exaggerated compliment to Italian marksmanship, kill about 200 million creatures, both aloft and on the ground.

Legally included in that bag for each hunter, if he gets his daily limit, are two pheasants, one hare, one partridge, 20 thrushes, one wild boar and as many pigeons, doves, sparrows and other common small birds as he can down.

Steep License Fees

To qualify for a shot at that bounty, hunters must pay up to $200 in some Italian regions for a license, although in others the cost is much lower. Here in Umbria, a license to hunt with a double-barreled shotgun costs about $30, plus a government tax of $20, according to Franco Rosi, head of the Umbrian regional hunting office in Perugia. The license for an automatic shotgun, which can hold five shots but is legally restricted to three, costs about $8 more.

Along with the license, Italian hunters get a log book in which they are legally required to enter a description of every kill, but there are too few game wardens to ensure that all of the shooters keep conscientious records and no one can say with certainty whether the log-book requirement acts as a restraint on illegal kills.

For those who are caught poaching or killing endangered species, the penalties can be stiff. Last month, for example, wardens caught a hunter who had just downed a migrating stork. He was quickly sentenced to three months in jail.

Because the laws are strict when they are enforced, some leading hunters oppose any further restrictions at all.

“Hunting legislation in Italy in fact, both as regards protecting species and the hunting calendar, is among the most restrictive in the world,” complained Giacomo Rosini, vice president of the Hunters Federation, in a recent interview with the police magazine, Ordine Pubblico.

Reforms Backed

Others, including the federation’s president, Polo Leparotti, want to see some environmentalist reforms begun, if only to stave off the threat of a hunting ban as a result of the proposed national referendum.

“Ideally, hunting in Italy is tantamount to reaping the interest of the capital of our national patrimony,” he said, urging that greater attention be paid to game preservation and breeding. “We propose that landowners who have land that is virtually useless for growing crops rent such land to would-be hunters for the breeding and raising of game.”

Another prominent hunting sportsman and landowner, Pierro Motturi of the Maremma region of Tuscany, said, “Serious hunters really want stricter laws concerning the safeguarding and the repopulation of hunting territories, even if this means shortening the hunting season.” The season on some bird species begins as early as Aug. 18 and ends on March 10.

But even the most conscientious hunters are fearful of what might happen if the referendum goes through. At the very least, that would oblige the government to enforce a no-hunting “breathing spell” of two or three years while the wildlife situation is studied and new legislation is debated. Whether and when the referendum will take place has not yet been decided, although more than a million signatures--twice the legal requirement--have been gathered, Smeraldi said.

Cease-Fire Scorned

The prospect of a mandatory cease-fire was scorned recently by Giulio Santarelli, the undersecretary of agriculture, as no more than “a proposal for a legislative vacuum, without an ecological philosophy to guarantee the balance of nature.”

Santarelli spoke at a special gathering of the hunting fraternity, 30,000 strong, in Rome two weeks ago, where the economic interests of the sport were spelled out both verbally and physically. Industry spokesmen said that hunting employs an estimated 33,000 Italians, including game wardens, gunsmiths, clothing makers and tradesmen, all of whom face unemployment if the sport is banned. Many of the threatened 33,000 were in the audience.

To underscore their fears, some of the angry but perhaps fortunately unarmed delegates to the hunters’ demonstration pelted the automobiles of two prominent anti-hunting proponents of the referendum, Marco Pannella, leader of the Radical Party, and Athos De Luca, a prominent member of the environmentalist Greens party.

As so often happens in hunting, the targets got away unhurt.