A dangerous and widespread practice is taking on alarming proportions in the Cypriot countryside. Today, many hunters arbitrarily place food and drinking troughs almost everywhere, in order to attract and gather game, mainly pigeon, in view of the hunting season.
This practice, while often presented as a "facilitation" or "care," constitutes a brutal man-made intervention that turns into a health bomb for wildlife.
The fundamental principle of traditional hunting is based on equal opportunity and the hunter's confrontation with the wild instincts of the prey in his natural environment. The creation of permanent feeding stations abolishes this balance, as it causes an artificial dependency. Prey is tamed, search is abolished, and hunting is turned into a premeditated, unethical trapping that tarnishes the image of the entire hunting community.
From a biological and epidemiological point of view, artificial feeders act as dangerous ecological traps. In nature, animals are dispersed for food, limiting contact. In the feeders and watering troughs, species with different biological needs, such as birds, rodents, ruminants, are massively crowded in the same place.
The mixing of faeces and secretions with food facilitates the horizontal and cross-transmission of serious pathogens and parasites between birds and mammals.
In addition to infectious diseases, the very foods used in illegal feeding pose toxicological risks. Low-cost cereals, exposed to high temperatures and summer humidity, develop dangerous mycotoxins, the main ones being aflatoxins, which are carcinogenic and highly hepatotoxic.
For ruminants, such as the Cypriot moufflon, the abrupt consumption of foods rich in carbohydrates, such as wheat and corn, causes acidosis of the stomach, destroying the microflora of the digestive system, a development that is almost always fatal.
Guaranteed food causes animals to lose their wild instincts and their reticence towards humans. At the same time, the constant concentration of prey attracts natural predators, such as foxes, but also poachers, who set up a trap at these stations, increasing the predatory pressure.
