Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi on Wednesday
filed a criminal suit against he Lazio regional government over
"the massive and uncontrolled" presence of wild boar in the
Italian capital's urban areas.
The boar invasion, said the 5-Star Movement (M5S) politician,
was due to a failure by the government, which is led by
Democratic Party (PD) former leader Nicola Zingaretti, to
implement effective management plans for the animals.
Raggi cited a 1992 law which says regions must "provide for the
control of species of wild fauna even in areas where hunting is
forbidden".
It was up to the regional government to capture the boar and let
them back into the wild, she said.
The M5S, a formerly anti-establishment and populist party, and
the PD, Italy's main centre-left party, are nominal allies at
the national level.
There have been several recent sightings of boar in Rome.
A family of wild boar were caught on CCTV cameras roaming a
central Rome street in search of food recently.
The animals, which appeared to be unfazed by passing cars and
wary pedestrians, were filmed in the central Via Fani, site of
late Christian Democrat statesman Aldo Moro's kidnapping in
1978.
The mother and her piglets appeared to be very hungry as they
rummaged through refuse, passersby said.
Italian farmers took to the street in front of parliament and
across the country in early July to protest what they say is an
"invasion" by wild boars into farmland and cities all over
Italy.
Farm group Coldiretti said that during the COVID year the number
of wild boar straying onto farms and roving the outskirts of
Italian cities had risen by 15% to a record total of 2.3 million
animals.
Coldiretti published what it called a "tragic" toll of one
incident caused by the boar every 48 hours in a year of COVID.
There have been 16 victims of wild boar incidents in the past
year, and 215 people injured, Coldiretti said.
The number of car crashes cause by animals on Italian provincial
roads has risen by 81% over the past 10 years, the farmers
association said.
Farmers, animal breeders and shepherds from all over Italy
gathered in all of Italy's 20 regional capitals starting in Rome
where they rallied outside the parliament building,
Montecitorio.
They said they want to "stop a calamity that destroys crops,
attacks animals, besieges stables and causes road accidents,
with concrete dangers for farmers and citizens".
A group of young farmers dressed up in boar costumes stopped MPs
and explained to them the "emergency situation" they have to
face each day.
Other farmers brought fruit, salad ingredients and cereal crops
that had been completely destroyed by boar.
The protesters also held up life-size cut-outs of boar to show
politicians how scary an encounter with the animals can be.
They also waved banners reading "After COVID, the plague of
boar", "We sow, the boar reap", "Let's defend our land" and
"Town and country united against wild boar".
Many city mayors came to Montecitorio, as well as ordinary
citizens worried about what they called "a full-blown
emergency".
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