Polish animal activists block governmentordered boar hunt

WIATROWIEC, Poland: Denouncing what they call the slaughter of wild boar, Polish animal rights activists are keeping a close watch on hunters and trying to stymie a cull ordered by the government.

Polish authorities introduced the hunting plan to stem an outbreak of African swine fever (ASF), which is deadly to wild boar and pigs and was first spotted in the EU member in 2014 when infected boar entered from Belarus.

“Stop hunting, come down, you look like a good man,” 44-yearold animal rights activist Anna Ruszkiewicz said to a hunter sitting in a hunting tower in the middle of a forest southwest of Warsaw.

“Come over to the other side of the barricade, join people like us who are protecting animals instead of killing them,” the activist clad in a yellow vest added gently.

Ruszkiewicz, who works as a public servant in Warsaw, undertook the hour-long drive from the capital along with around 40 others to block the hunt in the forest next to the village of Wiatrowiec.

“We’ve been walking around. Picking mushrooms. We have the right, no? The forest belongs to everyone,” she said.

For the dozen or so hunters, it is yet another failed hunt: one by one, they climb down from the towers and leave the forest to put away their rifles and drive away with their dogs.

“The goal is to stop them from just going over to another forest to hunt,” said Anna Michajlow, who is the coordinator of the animal rights operation.

On this day the activists come out on top, as not a single wild boar was shot in the area. The previous day only one was killed.

“The activists are keeping us from hunting. They blocked us yesterday, last weekend too. And again today they came in a few cars. We aren’t able to shoot,” said Ryszard Lewandowski, secretary for the Cyranka hunting association based in the central village of Jeziorka.

“It’s a vicious circle. The (environment) minister is asking us to hunt wild boar to stop the ASF virus from spreading — and we can’t,” he said. — AFP