Ten years of hunting in national newspapers (1992-2002) 2003

Eurispes survey analysed how the hunting phenomenon was represented in the Italian press between 1992 and 2002 and was conducted on two types of newspapers, independent and politically aligned, for 18 newspapers.

The social and economic components involved in land management (hunters, environmentalists and farmers) had reached a substantial agreement, which among other things, did not exclude forms of active collaboration, reinforced by Law 157/92, recognising the role and weight of the various actors in terms of active land management. However, the events of the last few months of 2003 signal a resumption of confrontation, and in some cases conflict, between hunters and environmentalists, due to some fundamentalist fringes of the hunting world to question the principles and objectives of the law. As a reaction to all this, the environmentalist world has become more rigid and has also been dragged along by the more radical fringes of the movement. The signs of this fracture go back a long way, and they also emerge from an analysis of the content of the survey entitled: Ten years of hunting, carried out by Eurispes.

The final result is that the balances that had been achieved on the issue of hunting and land management have been called into question, and a new season of harsh confrontation between environmentalists and hunters is looming, which could bring relations between these two important players back to the situation of the years before the referendum on hunting was held.