The Cyprus Greens – Citizens Cooperation express their anger concerning the incident where a hunter killed a family of foxes and also had the nerve to publish the killing through social media.
It’s not the first time that we face such incidents. Unfortunately, this is a result of the parliament’s decision, taken in 2014, to remove foxes from the list of protected species.
This decision was made with the excuse that the fox population on the island has multiplied, without of course having a complete scientific study to support this claim.
As a result of this wrong political decision, the legislation for protecting wild birds and pray from 2003 was revised in 2015 and allowed the Game Fund to intervene and carelessly reduce the population of foxes.
Due to the legislation’s revision, the last few months some so – called hunters killed foxes as a trophy or some even uploaded footage with them torturing foxes on the Internet.
The authorities in charge have a responsibility to inform the public that fox hunting in Cyprus is only allowed with a special permit and under strict control from the authorities. We do not know if the “hunter” mentioned above had the necessary permits. We expect and we ask from the authorities to investigate this case. If the hunter didn’t have a permit, then we are facing a poaching and illegal hunting weapon case and the authorities must do their duty.
Regarding this provocative post, we consider that it’s time to change the legislation about cybercrime and such posts must be considered as criminal offenses. We have already submitted a relative legislative proposal. We call upon the new Parliament to assume its responsibilities.
