Trained as a geologist - with a master's degree in "all science" given the most disparate topics on which he discusses - it is probably easy for him to have an eye on the past, but on Saturday evening we really witnessed a step back decades, finding all the worst concentrated commonplaces and defamatory statements about hunting and its practitioners typical of a period of ideological clashes that anti-huntsmen and extremist environmentalists try in every way to rekindle, warning that the wind seems to have finally changed for them. To sing it and play it rigorously alone - avoiding any kind of contradiction in the best tradition of propaganda broadcasts passed off as information - on RAI 3 the well-known Mario Tozzi he addressed the theme of hunting and poaching for the umpteenth time in the show “Sapiens”.
With a good but not very good start on what we first recognize as a plague, mixing images of shotguns and dead elephants has nevertheless found a way to affirm that among the characteristics that characterize the poacher there are opportunities, suggesting that as occasions make the thief man so do the hunter poacher. Had he stopped there it would have been a slip, we were told worse. But he thought about it immediately after, addressing the issue of whether hunting in Italy is ethical or not. Here he found a way to insert a pinch of class struggle - perhaps in homage to the eskimo with which he brandished an ice ax he appeared on broadcast some time ago - stating that according to an undeclared research, old but still good according to him, workers and the middle class would be opposed to hunting, supported instead by professionals and entrepreneurs.
From here, the ineffable professor, literally gave the numbers of what he said - his, because he was careful not to mention any source - is the impact on the wild species of Italian hunters, with a collection of well 494 million heads, killed by 600 thousand Italian hunters, which means for each of them, of us, the beauty of 733 prey every hunting season. Such an absurd number, given with the sole purpose of surprising the listener, that it does not even allow it to be taken into consideration as an average figure, but that in the past the amazement also makes some reflections. Even assuming that the numbers are true - and they are not - how can this data be reconciled with the affirmation of the animal-environmentalist part of the species in distress if not now at risk of extinction? To make it possible to take just under 500 million, there would have to be little, little, at least three times as much.
So how do you reconcile the presence of 1 billion and a half of wild species - but which ones, one is valid for the other as long as it is? So much for the scientific method! - with the claim that hunting puts them at risk? Considering then that none of the species hunted in Italy is in difficulty and that indeed some are in too much health - see wild boars - what would happen if there were no hunting? An answer can be given by the aforementioned wild boars, which not hunted in Rome by now drink in the Trevi fountain and in Genoa they compete for the beach with the bathers.
And then the final gloss, so as not to miss even a pinch of social alarm, recited with the right melodramatic tone and intense gaze towards the eyes of the viewer, when he affirms that the only reason for hunting is the pleasure of killing. In reality the problem is always the same and it is not the pseudo-truths told by Tozzi and by the many - too many - "colleagues" of him. The real problem is that freedom of thought and opinion - sacrosanct even in being against hunting - does not mean freedom to use a means that should be at the service of all citizens to propagate one's ideas. Fairness would like that at least there were equal spaces for both positions. Which never happens and if the match does happen it is usually somehow "rigged" anyway.
What further disconcerts is the space granted with too much and evident lack of pluralism by a company that clearly and complacently does not carry out its Public Service task and has long since lost its characteristics. Once again we have promptly reported to those responsible both the statements of the conductor - who knows he is calm because in Italy it is not a crime to defame a category - that the Company that gave him space and with the other Associations of the Control Room we are formalizing our protest. Obviously we are sure that a reminder - several times advanced - of professional correctness will not be enough, but since the only interest now is to listen to, we will remind the Rai Directorate General and that of Rai 3 that the latest collection of signatures against the hunt has hardly gathered a few tens of thousands of subscribers. Are they really sure that the majority of Italians are against hunting as Tozzi and his friends tell them? (Press Office of the Italian Hunting Federation).
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