Italy’s hunters have been accused of behaving like Wild West cowboys after a son mistook his father for a wild boar and shot him dead.
There are hunting accidents every year in Italy, with dozens of people injured, but it is rare for one family member to kill another.
The men were on a wild boar hunt near the village of Sicignano degli Aburni, in the southern region of Campania, when the accident happened at the weekend.
The 34-year-son heard his hunting dogs barking, saw some rustling in the bushes, and fired a shot.
But instead of taking down a boar, he had hit his 55-year-old father in the stomach. The man, named as Martino Gaudioso, died shortly afterwards.
AFP
The son has been charged with manslaughter and had his firearms confiscated.
The pair were not only out in the woods before the official start of the hunting season on October 2, they were also in a protected area where hunting is expressly forbidden at any time of the year.
Michela Vittoria Brambilla, a former government minister who now campaigns for animal rights, said it was time to clamp down on trigger-happy hunters.
“Enough with this Wild West behaviour in the countryside and the forests. The authorities cannot continue to portray the high number of deaths and injuries as something natural and inevitable,” said Ms Brambilla, from the Italian League for the Defence of Animals and the Environment.
While she and other activists would like to see hunting banned outright, they have put forward more realistic proposals, including a ban on hunting at the weekend when the hills and woods are full of dog walkers, hikers, runners and mushroom collectors.
Last year an 18-year-old man was fatally shot after being mistaken for a wild boar.
Nathan Labolani was walking his dog in the woods near Apricale, 10 miles north of Ventimiglia, close to the French border, when he was shot in the abdomen by a hunter armed with a Winchester rifle.
Anti-hunting activists said that people who ventured into the woods during the autumn and winter hunting season were “gambling with death”.
There are so many hunting accidents in Italy that there is even a national lobby group dedicated to those who are shot – the Association of Victims of Hunting.
According to the association, 22 hunters were killed and 68 were wounded during the 2017-2018 hunting season.
In the last 12 years, 230 people have been killed and 854 injured in hunting accidents, the association said.
There is no shortage of boar to shoot. Decades of emigration from rural areas and the abandonment of farmland has led to an increase in forest cover.
Italy’s wild boar population has doubled in a decade to around one million, according to Coldiretti, a national farmers’ organisation, which last month called for a drastic cull.
Wild boar not only cause millions of pounds’ worth of damage to crops, they also cause traffic accidents, some of them fatal, when they cross roads, often at night.
Boar are increasingly encroaching on the outskirts of cities such as Rome and Genoa, where they are now a common sight.
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