The Department of Environment will continue issuing bird-hunting licenses as a matter of course unless a serious outbreak of any special disease, such as the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), is reported in a specific area.
This was the result of a meeting headed by Ali Teymouri, director of the Hunting and Fishing Office at the Department of Environment, which was to discuss precautionary measures against the possible health harms resulting from hunting, IRNA reported.
According to the official, if Iran Veterinary Organization announces the outbreak of a bird disease in a province in a written notice, the DOE is committed to imposing a ban on hunting in the area to ensure the public's safety in the face of any health threat; otherwise, Teymouri said, "the department will continue its regular procedures of issuing permits."
The statement was released following an appeal by Reza Rafeipour, head of IVO, for an outright nationwide ban on bird hunting during the current year in an effort to prevent the outbreak of diseases common among wild and domesticated birds and keep the public safe. Rafeipour underscored that in January, some 100 million egg-laying hens kept in poultry farms were infected with the deadly avian flu across a large number of provinces in Iran, namely East Azarbaijan, Qazvin, Alborz, Tehran, Markazi, Isfahan, Fars and Khorasan Razavi.
To prevent the spread of the disease, DOE totally banned bird hunting and did not issue any license at the time.
"This year, too, the disease will definitely spread among all birds and eventually people, if no action is taken by officials," Rafeipour warned, calling on the DOE to prohibit bird hunting in the second half of the current year, which began on March 21.
Effective Strategy
However, according to Teymouri, strict prohibition of bird hunting is not practically possible, since there are numerous locals who make their living through hunting.
"The only possible way to effectively control the matter is to closely monitor cities that are more likely to turn into sources of avian flu, and limit or ban bird hunting in those areas."
Iran's poultry farms and free-range birds are hit by avian flu every year around the second half of the year. The recent outbreak, which spread to nearly all Iranian provinces, is said to have inflicted losses worth about half a billion dollars on production units so far, besides losses suffered by the public.
