looduskalender.ee

 

The Round Table discussion about the Animal of the Year is published as a serial. Taking part in the discussion: Executive Director of the Estonian Hunters’ Society Tõnis Korts, Deputy Executive Director Andres Lillemäe, hunter and organiser of nature trips Vahur Sepp, zoologist and wild boar behavioural investigator Ragne Oja, Looduskalender editor Gennadi Skromnov and editors of journal Loodusesõber Helen Arusoo and Mats Kangur.

 

The obligation to shoot boars is laid on each county and the numbers are large. Hunters are worried: will there be a distinction between hunting and simply killing animals? For hunters it is a question of morals.

 

Andres Lillemäe: There is one more moral issue. When I still was a rather small boy grandfather said, go take the rooster’s head off, we will have soup.” The kid went. Bang. I will remember it until death … and now I ask: how many roosters’ heads will you manage to cut off: 100, 200, 300? before there will be a block…

 

Gennadi Skromnov: Ask that in the slaughterhouse … 

 

Andres Lillemäe:  A hunter is in this position all year round, that we have to kill boars by any method at hand. We have been discussing between ourselves about where all the green and animal rights people and environmentalists are now, when the boar is made into a scapegoat. It can be shot without limits, without permit: even sows, and piglets left to starve. Because of the pest that arrived by human error we declare the boar free for all...

 

Gennadi Skromnov: The community has to ask itself these questions.

 

Andres Lillemäe: In meeting such obligations there will be a moral obstacle.

 

Vahur Sepp: When I worked for 18 years as hunter in the Tartu forest management department and had to shoot some hundred boars a year, the result was that now for instance I won’t go big game hunting. I don’t want to.

 

Andres Lillemäe: The other obstacle is a purely practical block. For 17 years I have been teaching here in the hunters’ society’s house that no animal’s death should be in vain. There must be a reason for hunting: I want food, I want to make something out of it or to regulate the numbers. But now there  will be senseless killing. We cannot eat it all – because now the meat can only be used locally, there is no time to sell it. Simply sending a bullet into them is no solution.

 

Tõnis Korts: We hunt as much as is needed and we use it all – that is our principle. Now it cannot be done. If it is not used: it means that a killing takes place and this is no longer hunting. Hunting and killing are very different things. Legislation today does not differentiate between them at all – we have tried to talk about it all the time but nobody listened to us. These things need different solutions in law.

 

But as the saying goes: in a crisis nothing good should be let go to waste. If we fought a few years ago for a new Hunting Act, wanting the role of the state as a regulator to be greater, it was very difficult for us  to find a stage from which to make ourselves heard. Today microphones are pushed up to us and we can talk about what worries us – thanks to this nobody has said anything particularly negative about the activities of hunters. Our contribution in the ASF crisis is very real: in addition to regulating the numbers we also contribute  by burying diseased dead animals. But there are still not solutions to the problems of hunters.

 

The series from the hunters’ round table continues.