Chianti’s winemakers back plan to cull 90% of the region’s wild boars

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/chianti-winemakers-back-wild-boar-cull

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When Francesco Ricasoli, a winemaker and the patriarch of one of the oldest noble families in Chianti, the fertile countryside between Florence and Siena, was growing up, it was exceedingly rare to see a wild boar roaming around the family’s vast property.

“When I was a kid, if I wanted to see these animals I had to go to the cinema,” Ricasoli said. “Now the animals are wildly and freely going around. They don’t have any enemies and they reproduce like, well, rabbits.”

These days, the winemaker is trying to think of ways to keep the pests out of his vineyard, and has already built costly two-metre high fences that he considers an eyesore in an area where they were never required before to keep the hungry creatures off his property.

Ricasoli lives and works in one of the most picturesque and historic areas of Italy. The Chianti region was the source of bitter feuding between the great Renaissance cities of Florence and Siena, and today the area produces one of the most popular wines exported by Italy, Chianti Classico. This wine, unlike another made elsewhere in Tuscany known only as Chianti, is made strictly in the Chianti region and is identifiable by the historic symbol of a black rooster on its bottle.

But there is a problem besieging this idyllic countryside. Hundreds of thousands of wild boar and small deer, known in Italian as caprioli, are reproducing at rates that the natural surroundings cannot sustain without major disruption to the ecosystem, allegedly with the help of some hunters. They have become such a nuisance that the regional government has proposed a controversial solution: a measure that would kill, by hunting and other means, nine out of 10 wild boar in Tuscany – more than 200,000 – over the next three years.

The proposed law, due for a vote in about a month, has pitted winemakers such as Ricasoli, who support the proposal, against a group of opponents that usually do not see eye to eye: hunters, environmentalists and some animal rights activists who believe the cull would be an inhumane and unethical response to the problem.

For supporters of the proposed law, such as Michele Cassano, an executive in a consortium of Chianti Classico winemakers, the solution cannot come fast enough. He said winemakers have been dealing with the issue for more than a decade, but that entrenched political support for hunters, who are opposed to any permanent reduction of the wild boar population, has kept a solution at bay for too long.

Sitting in the modern, warehouse-like offices of the Chianti Classico consortium, where large modern sketches of black roosters dominate the walls,Cassano points to an undercover video and photographs that recently landed in his hands.

One shows a group of wild boars – numbering in their dozens – roaming a wooded area, circling a man who is feeding them scraps of food and bread. This, Cassano points out, is a crime. Photographs also taken in the area show a pit in the woods that has been filled with loaves of bread for the boars.

“It’s absolutely the hunters who are doing this. It is an economic issue for them,” he said.

To grasp the complicated dynamics of the problem, Cassano said it is important to understand how hunting laws have changed since the 1990s. Since then, he said, the job of controlling the numbers of wild boar and deer in Tuscany has essentially fallen to a hunting association, even as the regional government explicitly mandated that it wanted to rebuild the population of boars.

“The [populations] began to reproduce quite quickly and more than was predicted,” Cassano said. “And control of the problem was put in the hands of the hunters.”

Cassano and others argue that a black market for wild boar meat has kept hunters interested in maintaining the wild boar population.

Those supporting the new proposals believe that the only solution is a dramatic – if temporary – change in hunting laws that would greatly increase the number of boars and deer that can be killed.

The overpopulation is primarily a concern for the winemakers because they have seen a big rise in the number of wild boars eating grapes and grazing on vineyards. The deer, in turn, eat the buds off young vines, creating economic havoc for the producers.

Marco Rimaschi, the top agriculture official in Tuscany, said that data collected over the past five years shows that the density of animals in the region is far greater than in the rest of Italy, and is one of the highest in Europe.

“This presence provokes significant damage to the agricultural businesses through the destruction of harvests and of rural structures and is one of the main causes of road accidents,” he said.

In 2010, the animals were officially blamed for causing damage worth €1.6m, and in 2015 that figure climbed to €3m, though the winemakers say the real numbers are far greater because official figures simply calculate the value of the grapes, not lost production.

“Another phenomenon is the presence of these wild animals in cities, and it has become necessary to take action to reverse the tendencies and quickly diminish their impact,” Rimaschi said.

So far, the biggest political impediment to action has been the power of hundreds of thousands of hunters in the region who – for various reasons – want to keep the population at current levels. But environmentalists and other activists are also opposed to the proposal.

Massimo Vitturi, of animal rights group LAV, argues that, while there is a problem in Tuscany, lawmakers need to find a more humane and ecological solution.

“Wild animals are a fundamental component of the world,” Vitturi said. “I believe hunting is inhumane, useless, cruel, damaging, very dangerous also for human beings, and polluting because of the lead in the cartridges. It proposes an approach of the strong overpowering the weak just as happens in war.”

Among other ideas, Vitturi said it would be better to try to control the fertility of the animals using drugs.

Proponents of the cull acknowledge that hunting such a vast number of animals is not an ideal humane solution. Cassano, who said he is an advocate for animals and does not eat meat, said the problem with sterilisation is that it would not solve the problem fast enough, and that it was not proven to be effective in controlling the boar and deer populations.

But when asked if the region had enough hunters, guns, and hunting licences to get the job done in a relatively short period of time – three years to kill nine out of 10 boars – Cassano shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s a good question,” he said.