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Paper short abstract:

The abandonment of mountain agriculture led to significant growth in wildlife population across the Italian Alps. Describing the case of an impoverished mountain valley in Trentino Province, this paper addresses the entanglements of hunting, tourism, and re-wilding in processes of conservation.

Paper long abstract:

In some of Italy’s least accessible Alpine valleys the progressive abandonment of mountain agriculture over the past half-century led to an ongoing process of re-wilding. As part of it, mountain pastures gave way to forests, mountain villages lost most of their inhabitants, and wildlife population grew to a level that is unprecedented in living memory. While some valleys benefitted from the growth in mountain tourism, particularly connected to winter sports, others experienced ongoing economic decline. This paper maps out an ongoing visual project focusing on hunting in a peripheral and impoverished mountain valley in Italy’s Trentino Province. Based on long-term ethnography among the valley’s small -- and shrinking -- community of hunters, and the use of camera traps, eco-acoustic recorders, as well as more traditional visual anthropology methods, we address the case of hunting tourism in the valley. Here, for a few years, a handful of chamois were “sold” to trophy hunters, and the revenues of such endeavor used for wildlife habitat restoration projects carried out by the local hunting association. Recently, however, this practice came to an end for two main reasons: the forced outsourcing of habitat conservation projects due to new provincial-level regulations, and the shrinking number of chamois as a consequence of the “return” of wolves in the valley. While small and seemingly inconsequential, this example shows the nexus of tourism, conservation efforts, and re-wilding that lies at the core of hunting practices in this region.