Poisoning makes truffle hunting a risky activity for dogs in Italy

On a sunny morning in the mountains near the sleepy town of Camerata Nuova, Italy, a small, curly-haired dog named Bella ran among the birch trees. Her owner, leaning on a long harpoon-shaped shovel, was shouting to encourage her. Bella darted toward a tree and dug under an almost frozen carpet of dead leaves.

“Black gold,” said Renato Tomassetti, 80, when Bella turned up with what appeared to be a burnt, reeking tennis ball. He and a group of other truffle hunters followed the dog deeper into the forest in the Simbruini Mountains, where she sniffed again near another tree.

“Stop!” Tomassetti shouted. “Leave it! Leave it!”

The younger men ran ahead and pulled Bella away from a dead fox. Her body bore the marks of death from strychnine poisoning—bloody eyes, fangs bared in a painful grimace, limbs outstretched.

Tomassetti quickly muzzled Bella, an energetic lagotto romagnolo (the Italian “truffle dog”), as the truffle hunters grimly peered down at the dead fox. The local police, the Carabinieri, brought their measuring sticks and a freezer bag, treating the area like a crime scene.

“It could have been one of our dogs,” Tomassetti said, blaming unknown “murderers” for trying to eliminate competition to have the truffle-rich forest “all to themselves.” The men around him nodded, smoked their cigarettes and declared themselves exasperated with Italy’s eternal truffle wars.

“This massacre has to end!” shouted Belardo Bravi, 46, in anguish.

Few things evoke such an enchanting Arcadian ideal – and such a romantic vision of old-world Italian – as the intense bond between truffle hunters and their dogs. The two work together through autumn mists and winter snows to unearth ambrosia tubers, treasures that are scraped into pasta, grated into sauces or infused into oils for the most sophisticated and rich palates.

Truffle hunting is a tradition often thought of as an upper-class pastime, Italy’s answer to fox hunting, and has inspired luxury tourism “experiences”, museums and movies.

But digging just below that surface reveals a sinister, murderous, money-hungry side to truffle hunting, one that casts the fungus less as a fragrant Italian delicacy than the blood diamond of a secret, deadly, perpetual war.

To protect areas rich in lucrative truffles, local hunters seek to scare outsiders and wipe out competition by blowing up pickup trucks, shooting at cars and slamming each other with their “vanghetto” shovels. In 2018, a springer spaniel named Willa became the sixth murdered in two years in Brignano Frascata, a small town in Piedmont, an Italian region known for its luxurious white truffles.

“Hundreds of dogs are killed each year,” said Tomassetti, who is also honorary president of the Lazio region’s association of truffle hunters, which he said has angered residents by successfully fighting the town’s attempts to stop outsiders from prospecting. black gold in its hills. “It happens all over Italy.”

Much of the violence appears to have taken place in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, which borders the Camerata Nuova, and where the poisonings were numerous enough to be mapped. Truffle hunters say much of the violence rarely arises because dog owners don’t want their secret truffle fields known. Instead, retribution is done through a well of water or a poisoned field. Sometimes there are civilian casualties.

On Jan. 7, Martina Ercoli and her family went on a nature walk on Mount Simbruini with their one-and-a-half-year-old brown lab, Brando. He ate a poisoned sausage and died in her brother’s arms. “Truffle hunters strike again,” locals said, according to her.

Two days later, Ercoli mourned the loss on Facebook, blaming “these criminals, presumably people who hunt truffles and spread poison baits to kill other people’s dogs in war”, drawing unwanted attention to the small town.

“It’s not right that the world knows us for this,” said Vincenzo Pelosi, 67, who owns the coffee shop in the quiet town square that sports a poster of westerns filmed in the surrounding hills. “There were 54 Westerns filmed here!”

Hours before Bella found the fox, Tomassetti, who lives in Rome, joined other truffle hunters wearing camouflage and coats from the National Association of Truffle Hunters of Italy outside Pelosi’s bar.

They were going to help the local Carabinieri do one last sweep of the area where Brando had eaten the toxic sausage. Among them was Antonio Morasca, 62, whose dog Thor also ate a poisoned sausage thrown under Morasca’s car on the morning of Jan. 6.

“I took it out of his mouth, but he ran away – he loved to run away – and put another one in his mouth,” Morasca said. “He started shaking. We took him back to the city and he started foaming. We made him eat salt to throw up, but the whites of his eyes turned red. His legs stretched out and he became rigid. He was dead before he died. we get to the clinic. Half an hour.”

The men shook their heads. “For us, the dog is like a child,” said Tomassetti. “Actually, more than a child.”

Daniele Formichetti, head of the Carabinieri’s forestry and canine division, led the hunt after he found a suspicious sausage earlier this week, which the authorities sent to the laboratory.

He had a hunch the culprit was a truffle hunter who knew where not to let his dogs sniff. His colleague, Ettore Maceroni, theorized that a hunter had worked in the area for a few days and then released poison to kill the competition. They considered stopping the cars on the mountain road to search the glove compartment and trunk for poisoned sausages. Neither was optimistic about catching the killer.

“Nobody talks,” Maceroni said.

The Carabinieri and the men crossed a rutted road bisecting the plains used as a backdrop for spaghetti westerns.

“This is the truffle hunter’s battleground,” Tomassetti said as he got out of his car near the site of the Labrador’s death. A specially trained Belgian Shepherd, Asia, jumped out of the Carabinieri’s van.

“Search,” said Formichetti.

As Asia investigated, Tomassetti and his friends complained that there was an “omertà”, or mafia code of silence, among truffle hunters.

“Maybe it’s one of us,” he said.

“Don’t look at me when you say that!” his friend Mario Morganti, 62, snapped.

Some suspected a resident who drank coffee in the city bar.

“I’m going to hide in the woods,” said Bravi, who almost lost her own dog, also named Bella, 12 years ago to poisoning. He had installed a video camera in his jeep to see who was approaching as he drove the dogs away. “It’s working now. And then, when I pick him up and see him in the square, I’m going to break his little hands.”

Asia finished her scan without finding any evidence. Tomassetti then let Bella out of the back of the jeep, but prudently kept her on a leash. When they got deeper into the forest, he released her. She discovered truffles and then found the fox’s body.

After the Carabinieri took the corpse to the lab, Tomassetti and the others returned to their jeeps. As Bella scratched at her crate, he looked out over the forest and lamented that the local truffle hunters wanted it all for themselves. The jeep returned to Rome, and he walked with Bella in front of the maximum security prison near her house.

“That’s where these killers must be,” he said.