CASTELLABATE – The wild boar alarm is back, the alarm bells are the latest incidents in Castellabate and along the Cilento coast. In nearby Montecorice, at the beginning of the month, the alarm had already sounded with a seventy-year-old man who had even mistaken his wife for a hoofed one while she was working on the vegetable garden, hitting her with a shot in the back. A week later the real wild boars returned to show up in earnest, this time in the Buonanotte locality in Castellabate, causing an accident between three cars just before the junction for the Ogliastro Marina hamlet. Fortunately, the people involved remained unharmed from the rear-end collision and the head-on collision, but the alarm remains high. The first citizen of Castellabate, Luisa Maiuri, is also aware of this: “Already in September 2020 we requested, as a Municipality, interventions to address the issue of wild boar overpopulation”.
The mayor’s request reached the Ministry of the Environment and the Cilento National Park. «In light of the facts – says the first citizen – only palliatives have been adopted that have not given concrete answers to the emergency such as the wild boar emergency action plan and the selecontrollers. I believe that the regulatory content must be fundamentally reviewed. So up to now we have registered a lot of indifference on the part of the institutions ». For the director of the park, Romano Gregorio, the institution tried to tackle the problem: «It must be said that the presence of ungulates does not only concern our territory. We used the strategy of selecontrollers (hunters with special authorizations, qualifications and titles) and proceeded to cull over 4500 animals. We have created collection centers where the selecontrollers will deliver the slaughtered animals which will be observed by a company that will market the meat, after having stored them in the cold rooms. We have also issued a tender for the installation of electrified fences for 320 thousand euros. Unfortunately – adds Gregorio – the issue of wild boar overpopulation also damages us as a Park Authority. We are victims like citizens. Surely, it must be emphasized, the introduction of non-native wild boar species, operated by hunting associations, has certainly not helped in recent years ».
The response of the hunters was not long in coming. “When the Park was established in 1992, the wild boar was a species known only by hunters and some farmers as its presence on the territory was regulated by the hunting activity that carried out a planned sampling based on the consistency of the species – says Dino Torre , president of Enalcaccia of Salerno -. With the creation of the Park, wanted by the mayors and politicians who saw in this institution the panacea to all the economic problems of their municipalities, the whole territory was “embalmed” and man was no longer allowed to make the necessary corrections for a good trend of biodiversity “. Torre speaks of appeals to politics that have fallen on deaf ears on the boar emergency, when in the past it was already evident to hunters. “The only possible remedy today – adds Torre – is to re-establish a fruitful collaboration with the hunting world and in symbiosis with the institutions to find the solution to a problem generated by myopia and the lack of knowledge of those who administer the Park Authority”.
Bruno Marinelli