Newsgroups: rec.birds
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From: marcone@math.psu.edu (Alberto G. Marcone)
Subject: Re: round-the-world birding trip
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Organization: Department of Mathematics, Pennsylvania State University
References: <969@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz> <3078@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: Wed, 29 May 1991 19:07:29 GMT
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In article <3078@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> sandee@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (Daan Sandee) writes:
>
>I doubt you will find anything documented on Italy. Italians
>don't look at birds, they shoot them. 
>
>Daan Sandee                                           sandee@scri.fsu.edu
>Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
>Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052  (904) 644-7045

Being Italian I felt I need to say something about this. It is true
that activities like birdwatching are far less widespread in Italy
than in most other countries (I myself became a birdwatcher in the USA)
but the sensibility of Italians about environmental problems is 
steadily on the rise. Daan refers explicitly to hunting but probably
does not know the widespread opposition to hunting in Italy: last year
there was a referendum aimed at virtually abolishing hunting in Italy
and (if I recall this correctly) about 90% of the ballots cast were
against hunting. Unfortunately less than 50% of the voters cast their
votes and so the referendum did not work [this is widely attributable
to the lobbying of the weapon industry and the hunting associations, 
which managed to split the referendum from the local elections and
hold it at the beginning of summer with as little publicity as
possible]. I think that on this the gap between the sensibility of
the average Italian citizen and the political system is particularly
wide (even for Italian standards): hunters are a small group very
well organized and (for the moment) they have managed, resorting to
all means, to avoid being outlawed, as the Italian ecological
situation I think warrants.
Since this is not trial.soc.culture.italian I go back to my point
saying that when I moved to the USA three years ago I was surprised
at the amount of social approval that hunting has in this country:
the New York Times has a weekly column on hunting, but no Italian
newspaper would publish anything like that, because it knows that it will
be heavily boycotted (and few people will read it, anyway).
I am sending directly to the original poster a few references I
have for birding in Italy.
This wasn't intended to be offensive for anyone: we should just
be careful to avoid reasoning by stereotypes...

Bye,
Alberto			marcone@math.psu.edu