A dangerous and widespread practice is taking on worrying proportions across the Cyprus countryside. Today, several hunters are placing food and water sources arbitrarily, almost everywhere, aiming to attract and concentrate game, chiefly wood pigeon, ahead of the hunting season.
This practice, though often presented as a “convenience” or an act of “care,” amounts to a forceful human intervention that is turning into a health hazard for wildlife.
The founding principle of traditional hunting rests on equal opportunity and on the hunter matching wits with the wild instincts of the prey in its natural environment. The creation of permanent feeding stations dismantles that balance, generating an artificial dependency. The prey becomes tame, the element of search disappears, and hunting turns into a premeditated, unethical form of entrapment that tarnishes the image of the entire hunting community.
From a biological and epidemiological standpoint, artificial feeders function as dangerous ecological traps. In nature, animals disperse in search of food, limiting contact between them. At feeding and watering points, however, species with entirely different biological needs, such as birds, rodents and ruminants, crowd together in large numbers at the same spot.
The mixing of droppings and secretions with the food facilitates horizontal and cross-species transmission of serious pathogens and parasites between birds and mammals.
Beyond infectious disease, the feed used at these illegal stations carries its own toxicological risks. Low-cost grains, exposed to the high temperatures and humidity of summer, develop dangerous mycotoxins, chief among them aflatoxins, which are carcinogenic and highly hepatotoxic.
For ruminants such as the Cyprus mouflon, the sudden consumption of carbohydrate-rich feed such as wheat and corn causes stomach acidosis, destroying the microflora of the digestive system, an outcome that is almost always fatal.
A guaranteed food supply causes animals to lose their wild instincts and their wariness of humans. At the same time, the steady concentration of game draws in natural predators such as foxes, as well as poachers, who lie in wait at these stations, increasing the overall predation pressure on wildlife.
