00049
Rome's neglected parks and gardens? Send in sheep and goats, says mayor
Nick Squires for The Telegraph
17 MAY 2018
Rome's embattled mayor wants …
00049
Rome's neglected parks and gardens? Send in sheep and goats, says mayor
Nick Squires for The Telegraph
17 MAY 2018
Rome's embattled mayor wants to use sheep and goats to graze back into shape the city's chronically neglected parks and gardens – inviting mockery from political opponents.
Years of budget cuts mean there is an acute lack of council gardeners to take care of the capital’s extensive green spaces.
Parks, gardens, verges and the banks of the Tiber are in a lamentable state - grass is often chest high, cane thickets grow to 15ft or more and benches are smothered in jungle-like vegetation.
Virginia Raggi, a member of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement which is poised to form a national government with the hard-Right League, thinks introducing sheep and goats is the way to go.
The idea was raised by a councilor in charge of environmental affairs, Pinuccia Montanari, who said: “The mayor recently urged me to look at the use of sheep or other animals (for managing parks and gardens). It is a simple method that they use in other big cities like Berlin.”
There is an acute lack of council gardeners to take care of the capital’s extensive green spaces. A small herd of Gotland sheep are used to keep down the grass in the gardens of Charlottenburg Palace in the German capital, grazing between May and November.
But opposition politicians were less than impressed.
“Goats and sheep as lawnmowers? It all makes sense,” said Orlando Corsetti, a member of the centre-Left Democratic Party.
“Raggi clearly deeply loves animals because she has filled the city with rats, seagulls and wild boar (which feed off uncollected rubbish), so a few goats would complete Five Star’s Roman zoo.”
Wild boar are increasingly encroaching on the outskirts of Rome – a few days ago a small herd was seen snuffling along a busy road in an area of the city known as Nero’s Tomb.
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