Hunting is introduced in Andalusian classrooms

93 schools, 8% of them in provincial capitals, have chosen the educational project developed by the

to "bring nature and its knowledge closer to Primary school students".

According to data from the

, most are secondary schools, 58, and the province with the most requests is Jaén (18), followed by Córdoba, Seville and Málaga, with 13 centers each.

The FAC considers it a "resounding success" that this number of interested parties has been achieved in the first course, although these 93 centers represent 4% of the 2,300 open in Andalusia.

The so-called 'Footprints' project will offer training "aimed at knowing nature, its conservation and protection through sustainable use," he adds, since the Ministry has preferred that the Federation report it.

This achievement of the hunters is unprecedented, since there is no Spanish Community, indicates the FAC, with a project within the classrooms of this magnitude.

Only

dedicates a few days to something similar;

yes, with a much higher controversy because the authorized students shoot with compressed air rifles, something that will not happen in Andalusia.

'Huellas' arises from pressure from Vox to promote the culture of hunting, one of its basic electoral axes.

There are reasons.

The number of hunting licenses in Andalusia has decreased by 25% since 2004 -from 300,000 to just over 225,000-, and the average age of the hunter has risen from 42 to 52 years in the last decade, according to the

, with very little presence of women and young people.

This document already collected the need to introduce "positive" contents of the hunting activity in school classrooms to alleviate its decline.

The Andalusian Plan attributes this "decrease by leaps and bounds" to the change "from an agrarian society to another markedly urban one", where "the perception of hunting is mediated by the bad news published in the press", which includes "only strange, negative and unwanted events; the thousands of normal events are not news".

The Plan admits the "drastic decrease in the last half century" of small game in which the main species, such as rabbit and partridge, have fallen by up to 90%.

In this course, the students who follow the Footprints project will have as specific content the tracking of animals through their tracks, archery and falconry exhibitions, workshops on responsible ownership and basic training of dogs that carry out auxiliary tasks (hunting, herding... ), recovery of lost gastronomy and use of food as a gastronomic memory, enhancement of game meat as a sustainable natural resource, analysis of the evolution of the natural and urban environment of the municipality where the project is applied or initiation to survival techniques in The natural environment.

Now, the schools will have to shape it jointly with the

.

María Nuevo

, coordinator of the project for the Hunting School of the Andalusian Hunting Federation, affirms that "far from what one might think, it is not about training in hunting matters, nor indoctrinating in relation to hunting activity: we only try to bring nature closer to children, improve contact with it, that they know the natural and sustainable uses of the forest and that they have their own arguments and criteria to judge their position regarding any of them".

'Huellas' is part of the 'Living and Feeling Heritage' Program of the Department of Educational Development.

The capitals where there will be schools that teach hunting content are Seville, Jaén, Granada and Almería.

The provinces of Huelva and Cádiz are the ones that have shown the least interest in this option.

According to data from the

, in Spain around 643,000 pieces of large game are captured each year, mainly wild boar (350,000), deer (182,000), roe deer and fallow deer.

Small game catches about 20 million pieces, mainly rabbit (6 million), partridge (2.7), and thrush (5.5 million).

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