Even for Italy’s right-wing Northern League, it was a rather aggressive way to treat a foreigner. At the weekend, members of the powerful opposition party planned a protest against the country’s latest immigration threat.
As part of a celebration of Alpine culinary traditions the Northern League planned a mass barbecue of Slovenian brown bear steaks. The creature is being reintroduced into the mountainous areas of Northern Italy but Northern League politicians say they pose a safety threat to people and livestock.
Food safety officials intervened yesterday to halt the picnic near the town of Imer in Trentino in the Italian Alps, which had outraged animal rights groups. Officers from the national police food safety unit told organisers it was illegal to serve Ursus arctos arctos. The meat was imported from Slovenia, where it is legal to hunt the bear, but lacked the necessary import papers.
The anti-immigrant Northern League is an increasingly restive ally in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition Government and its politicians in Trentino oppose the reintroduction of the brown bear from neighbouring Slovenia, which is part of a conservation project financed by the equally unpopular European Union.
There are believed to be around 35 to 45 bears livingin Italy’s central and eastern Alps as a result of the Life Ursus scheme, which uses radio collars to track the animals’ movements.
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“This is a provocation because nobody listens to us,” Maurizio Fugatti, a local Northern League MP and one of the bear barbeque organisers, said before the event.
“The situation is really dangerous: there are bears wandering around the towns putting the safety of people and livestock at risk,” Mr Fugatti said. “Imagine going for a walk in the mountains with your family and coming face to face with a hungry bear.”
Several Government ministers were swift to condemn the League’s “scandalous initiative”. Among them was the Tourism Minister, Michela Brambilla, who recently underscored her animalist credentials by posting a video on the internet that shows her playing with a full-grown tiger.
In a joint statement with the Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, Ms Brambilla pointed out that the origin of the bear meat was “certainly illegal and ought to be rapidly controlled”.
Erminio Boso, the Northern League Euro-MP who broke the news of the bear meat ban to the hungry picnickers, said he suspected the Government was behind the intervention.
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“It’s Rome that sent them and they came from Vicenza,” he told the rally. “I will call [Umberto] Bossi on Monday and ask him to leave the coalition.”
The League’s leader has been growing increasingly impatient with Mr Berlusconi over his handling of the economy since disastrous recent coalition performances in local elections and a referendum, but it is unlikely Mr Bossi will choose bear meat as the pretext for bringing down the Government.
Three of the cooks involved in the initiative told the Venice newspaper Il Gazzettino that bear meat required slow cooking over a low flame for about three hours to prevent it from getting tough.
The cooks said there were plenty of recipes from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when official rewards were offered to anyone who killed a bear.
“We’re not saying we should still do that, because times have changed, but eating the meat once helps to exorcise the fear that they spread through the area,” the paper quoted the cooks as saying.
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Massimiliano Rocco, a spokesman for WWF Italy, said the Northern League’s bear picnic put the country’s environmental credibility at risk.
“Let’s stop talking about the economic costs of the damage caused by bears when they are insignificant in relation to the real problems of agriculture and animal husbandry,” Mr Rocco said.