European Commission and my hunting rights (2)

I am a 70-plus-year-old hunter, not a sportsman, not a dilettant tas-senter, but an old type kaċċatur. I have “inherited” this activity from my father and my two grandfathers. During my working days I used to rigorously ensure I booked my leave for the last two weeks in April and the first week in May, every year without fail. I would start looking forward to the next year at every season’s end. Autumn was not regarded as a hunting season.

Now we are ridiculously limited in our seasonal catch and made to wear a humiliating numbered armband (just like in Nazi Germany), among other strict regulations with SMSs and what not.

Hunting is part of nature and nature controls the number of turtle doves/quails that come to Malta. The birds that pass over Malta, enroute to mainland Europe, are a fraction of the population of the species of a migration front stretching from Atlantic Morocco to Far East Asia.

The Malta route has considerably decreased in numbers in these last 40 years or so due to development of the North African Mediterranean coast. Spring hunting is exercised, unofficially, all over Europe despite EU regulations, and (in their case) without any concession or derogation and despite BirdLife, which seems to find its big mouth only in small Malta (Illegal hunting? Treat as other illegalities – fine or jail, what the court decides. We are talking of honest men). Furthermore, spring hunting in mainland Europe is, in fact, destructive as it is exercised in the forests while birds are nesting.

But it is only Malta that is breaching the regulations, notwithstanding the European Court of Justice judgment, ruling that autumn hunting is no alternative to spring hunting, thereby indicating the spring hunting bag has to be much, much larger than that in autumn.

Wake up Malta. We are being bullied because of our size.

Just imagine if we had to make it compulsory for irregular immigrants to wear a similar numbered armband. We would be kicked out of the EU.