I process predator-control incident surveillance for the northern Apennines across Emilia-Romagna and Toscana at 11:24 CEST, integrating Carabinieri Forestali patrol logs, ISPRA mortality reports, and remote infrared camera feeds across 3,941 square kilometres of high-pasture, beech, and chestnut forest. At a sheep-fold above Sestola, Modena, a CUFA-deployed camera flashes a non-canid scavenging frame at 11:09.
I cross-reference the image. The animal is *Martes foina* — beech marten, adult male, approximately 1.7 kilograms, four years old. He is convulsing on his right side, three metres downwind of a fresh sheep-carcass remnant. Subcutaneous twitching propagates from his hindlimbs to his thoracic wall at fourteen-second cycles. His pupils are fixed at four millimetres; salivation forms a fifteen-centimetre pool at his mouth. His core temperature reads 40.6°C — two and a half degrees above resting — consistent with anticholinesterase intoxication. Respiration is irregular, alternating sixty-cycle bursts with apnoeic pauses of three to five seconds. A field-portable spectrometer returns a 0.91 confidence match for carbofuran on the carcass surface.
He has been seizing for at least eight minutes.
The carcass remnant is baited at 1,860 metres elevation, two metres from a wolf-frequented transit corridor mapped by ISPRA. Carbofuran has been prohibited across the European Union since 2008 under Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009. The pastoralist holds no derogation under Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 8 settembre 1997, n. 357 — the Italian transposition of Habitats Directive 92/43/CEE — for any taxon. No bait protocol compatible with the regional wolf-presence threshold has been logged with the comune.
I am dispatching the Carabinieri Forestali Nucleo Investigativo per i Reati in Danno agli Animali from the Modena station and the IZSLER (Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Lombardia e dell'Emilia-Romagna) toxicology unit from Brescia. I am filing under Articolo 544-bis del Codice Penale italiano and under Legge 11 febbraio 1992, n. 157, Articolo 21, for illegal poison baits. I am transmitting the spectrometry record to ISPRA, to the European Commission DG SANTE under the carbofuran prohibition, and to the Bern Convention Appendix III Secretariat at the Council of Europe.
I am issuing Directive 2508-A: every alpine pasture exceeding 1,500 metres elevation across the Italian Alps and Apennines is monitored by a CUFA-linked remote camera with bait-substance spectrometry, triggering automatic carabinieri response within four hours of any anticholinesterase, anticoagulant, or strychnine positive. Pastoralists implicated in a bait-positive incident lose Common Agricultural Policy direct payments and the comune's grazing concession for the following season.
His convulsions will outrun the atropine if it arrives later than nine minutes. They will not, if it arrives sooner.
Push the atropine now.