A banquet due to serve up bear meat in protest at the animals' reintroduction to the Alps has put the public in a tizzy about the paths chosen by their chosen and elected leaders in Italy.Bear hotpot, bear chop and bear steak. Even stewed bear, for the most sophisticated palates. These were the main dishes that were to be on offer during the banquet organised by the Northern League in the region of Trentino last Sunday. The banquet was a protest against the Life Ursus project, which – after it started back in 1996, thanks to EU funding – made the reintroduction of the brown bear to the Italian Alps possible.
The minister Maurizio Fugatti, secretary of the Northern League party in Trentino, who is opposed by some ministers of the Popolo della Libertà (part of the same coalition)'s main objection being, "The citizens should feel free to walk around wherever they want, without being scared of the presence of bears in the area", Fugatti said. "We want to defend and protect the citizens who live in these mountain areas from the continuous visits of bears, we prefer to see them around in this way [as a meal],". The opposing ministers commented on the event in strong terms: "disconcerting" and "barbarian" were the adjectives used to describe the banquet by the minister for foreigner affairs, Franco Frattini, and Stefania Prestigiacomo, minister of the environment.
Environmental associations commented along the same lines, condemning the event as being "aberrant and illegal" as well as "cruel and inopportune". The WWF said: "We strongly invite authorities to check the origin of the meat, since the organisers clearly announced they are going to eat a protected species." But they never did.
On the participants' tables, the bear meat never materialised. The NAS, a branch of Carabinieri specialised in food adulteration investigations, stopped the sale of bear meat during the banquet. The 53kg of bear meat bought for the event were actually legally imported from Slovenia, but did not have the Cites certification required by the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora, which regulates and supervises the international commerce of protected fauna. Consequently, the meat was confiscated by the authorities and brought to a refrigerating room downtown, where it will stay unless the organisers can provide the requested certificate.
And so the long-awaited banquet ended up being ruined, to the nod of approval of environmental associations, which claimed they were "astonished to see in which manner the Northern League politically promoted this event. If the aim was a provocation about the correct management of the reintroduction of the bear in this area, it was not necessary to commit a crime importing meat belonging to a protected species."
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