Valencia (EFE).- Thousands of hunters have gathered this Saturday in the center of Valencia to defend the “essential” of their activity for the maintenance of the environment and protest against what they consider to be repressive policies that grip their activity.
The president of the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation, Manuel Gallardo, recalled that this entity has 337,000 members throughout Spain “more than the PP and the PSOE together”, some “40,000 of them in the Valencian Community”, for what he believes which is the “largest civil organization” in this region.
Defense of hunting activity
“Today we are in Valencia, tomorrow we will be in Logroño following a schedule of mobilizations that the only aim is to defend the hunting activity from the attacks to which we are being subjected by, or by, the executives of this country” .
“The only thing we want is to defend an essential activity for the environment, essential for conservation, for road safety, for animal health, in short, essential for the rural world. In recent years we have witnessed an animal offensive with the animal welfare laws and the modification of the Penal Code”, Gallardo denounced.
In his opinion, they are “repressive and regressive laws based on a punitive populism that in the end tries to impose some rules with an ideology, in this case the animalist one, that in no case coincides with society in general and much less with the rural world. ”.
Suffocation situation
In this same sense, the president of the Hunting Federation of the Valencian Community, Lorena Martínez, has denounced the situation of “suffocation” suffered by Valencian hunters, who “mandatorily have to take care of balancing the wild boar populations” and also “They have to pay for it.”
“We are responsible for paying people who have traffic accidents with wild boars and we do not have a single aid that makes our capacity as hunters more effective, because they force us to hunt wild boars but we have nowhere to take them. There is not a single meat inspection room for game meat to be able to donate or market it, we do not have a single help ”, he insisted.
“In Catalonia they are giving 20 euros per shot wild boar, in Castilla-La Mancha they are giving away hunting licences, in Murcia they are with a zero rate… And here not only do we not have any help, but we also have to pay. The Valencian hunter invests 18 million euros a year in improvements to the forest. Not only for hunting species, but for all, and in return we only suffer measures that complicate our existence to continue hunting ”, he added.
“Enough of dad’s pijoflautas”
In the concentration of the hunters, posters with slogans such as “enough of papa’s pijoflautas” or “couch ecolojetas” have been seen.
The PPCV campaign director, Miguel Barrachina, has also spoken on this matter, stating that “Puig and his partners from Compromís and Podemos must stop considering hunters environmental criminals because they are the greatest defenders of the natural environment.”
Barrachina went to the demonstration “to claim that the hunting activity is a fundamental function in the countryside”, together with the organizing secretary of the PPCV, Juan Francisco Pérez, and the provincial presidents of the PP of the province of Valencia and Castellón, Marta Barrachina and Vicent Mompó.
The entry Hunters claim their “essential” activity for the rural world was first published in EFE Noticias.