Allow me to refer to the article mistakenly headlined German Ambassador Rejects Hunters’ Arguments (March 14).

Hardly! On the contrary, Ambassador Hubert Ziegler avoided the main point of our letter, namely that Malta is being singled out for unfair treatment from the other offending EU countries. Neither BirdLife Malta nor CABS have denied our accusation. It is now up to the Malta Tourism Authority and those bodies benefiting from tourism, especially Maltese hoteliers, to question the negativity of German brochures that deal with tourism to Malta.

Whatever the ambassador thinks, hunting serves its original useful purpose: that of providing food for the hunter. In our time, this has taken on a greater significance than formerly because hunting provides an occasion for the provision of uncontaminated meat, free from the artificial interventions of modern animal breeding. It certainly does not look as if “hunting is overdue to disappear from our planet”.

In fact, the reverse is true. Hunter numbers, especially within the EU and in Malta, are constantly on the increase.

Unlike the ambassador, we do not presume to know God’s mind. But it appears that God made man lord over the earth and its creatures. One cannot deny that God’s Son enjoyed lamb and neither that His parents did not refrain from offering up two turtle doves for sacrifice in the temple.

The outgoing ambassador commits the usual errors of the average anti-hunter and has shown he has a confused idea of ethics. He attributes ethical qualities to birds by referring to their “innocence” as if birds can ever possess the ethical qualities of innocence or guilt.

Moreover, he assumes that hunters enjoy the actual killing of the creatures they hunt. This is tantamount to saying that anglers take sadistic pleasure at watching life ebb away from the fish they catch. This is certainly not the case.

The death of the hunted quarry is the ultimate and inevitable action resulting from a successful hunt. The hunter derives enjoyment from all the other actions leading to a successful pursuit and is not sadistically joyous over the death of his quarry.

Naturally, the ambassador does not understand this fact. Hopefully, his successor will have a more enlightened and informed view.

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