Licensed to Kill
From OSBERT HASTINGS
ROME
IT used to be said by Giolitti that the best way
for an Italian Prime. Minister to lose office was to introduce legislation on hunting. Having seen the dangers involVed, he was wise enough to avoid the issue. In fact, no government pressed the point from the time of the achievement of national unity until Mussolini felt strong enough to impose a uniform set of regulations which still remain more or less intact. The present Government is treading very warily with its pro- posed tightening of the regulations; Bills put by private members -there are a dozen or so ready and waiting to be introduced into the Chamber —can be sure of a fairly withering cross-fire.
About one million Italians have a licence to hunt. The business has nothing in common with its British equivalent. There are no formalities and few elements of class involved. A licence is necessary, a gun, a dog and a thick pair of boots; if possible, a pair of riding breeches and a green jacket heighten the impression of occasion for the hunter himself and almost all of these acces- sories can be bought, on deferred payments, at department stores. In most parts of the country there is not a great deal to be shot, but the thought that there might be something provides the excuse for a weekend of fresh air.
The complication is that the methods are different from one part of the country to another and so are the traditions. There is a basic ciifference between north and south. Southerners have a much freer concept of hunting and there are historical reasons for this. Partly because the southern provinces were poorer and any sort of food was likely to be a useful acquisition to the table, regulations were easier. The Bourbon monarchy may have been the negation of God, but at least it was paternalistic. Game of much size scarcely existed. Plenty of migratory birds passed over the old kingdom of Naples, how- ever, and still do, for that matter; quails and smaller birds. The royal laws oil the subject applied few limits and in effect forbade hunting only in the vineyards when the grapes were ripening. In most of the north---in Piedmont, Lombardy, the duchies of Parma and Modena, and as far south as the grand duchy of Tuscany —regulation was more severe. There was greater thought for tomorrow. Limits of time and place were applied. Hunting was illegal without permission from the authorities or against the expressed wishes of landed pro- prietors. The spring migrations were protected, as were the periods of reproduction. The central belt made up of the papal states generally ordered things in a way that permitted hunting in areas that could be entered without difficulty and speci- fically permitted the killing of quail on their arrival at the coast.
These differences were allowed to survive for political reasons. Many Bills were introduced in the early days of national unity in an attempt to unify the legislation on hunting. They failed because so many of the governments, though Piedmont was the moving power in unification. depended on parliamentary majorities drawn from a core of southern deputies. This is the meaning of Giolitti's remark. It also explains why Mussolini, who did not have to worry so much about Parliament, was the first head of a government able to apply some sort of unity in matters of hunting.
After the last war an attempt was made at de- centralisation. The provinciA administrations
were allowed a certain hand in fixing the dates for the opening of the local hunting season and its closing day. There is still not enough game to go round. The extreme left has introduced a new political issue by attacking the concept of private game reserves. The Government's answer to this insistence on a class factor is that the owners of game preserves have invested far more money than the public authorities in restocking the country's patrimony of game, which suffered heavily as a result of the war. Another aspect of the problem is that other European countries are inclined to throw up their hands in horror at the Italian habit of shooting or netting small birds, such as thrushes and larks, which accounts for the lack in Italy of bird-song.
Essentially, however, the dispute still turns on the differences between the old states which existed before national unification. One of the latest of the Bills prepared for discussion in the Chamber has revived this feeling founded in historical differences. It is signed by seventy-five deputies. The aim includes the granting of new powers to provincial administrations to extend the season for the hunting of migratory birds in those parts of the country—notably the south —where such forms of hunting are either tradi- tional or of economic importance. News of the Bill brought immediate protests from the north. especially from Piedmont, which is not on the route of migratory birds. It was pointed out that the majority of its backers were southern deputies. Quite apart from the objection that it favoured the south and not Piedmont, the more substantial objection was that a real raising of the limits would affect more than the birds of passage because the breeds that remain in Italy are inclined to head to the warmer south in the winter where they find supplies of food in the olive groves and the juniper berries. There would be a danger, in other words, of wholesale slaughter of the stocks in a manner which northerners and the hunters of the central regions would be wiser than to allow in their own areas. Probably nothing will come of this Bill either. Deputies are still extremely diffident on the sub- ject. The Government is finding in its efforts at imposing greater discipline that members of Parliament are liable to look on hunters as a potential voting group a million strong, a powerful lobby. They are not, of course, because most of them could be expected to vote one way or another for other reasons than those concerned with the limits for netting thrushes. The conclusion probably is that on the day when Italy approves an important new law on hunting the process of national unification, in- cluding social, economic and political aspects, can be regarded as complete. But it will not be for some time yet.
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