Toting a shotgun and shooting birds was a privilege and not a right for it was the Maltese people who had the right to enjoy the environment, Spring Hunting Out spokesman Saviour Balzan said yesterday.
In a debate on spring hunting at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, Mr Balzan said the countryside “belonged to us all”. Yet, people wishing to enjoy the countryside in spring were met with illegal hunting hides, threats, acts of aggression and being shooed-off.
He accused hunters of committing vandalism and said hunters wrongly claimed that public land was private property, though they failed to substantiate their claims through actual land titles.
The 41,000 Maltese people who signed a petition to force the referendum on spring hunting had decided to change the way the Maltese countryside was viewed, Mr Balzan said.
“Malta is the country with the highest concentration of hunters but also the smallest stretches of countryside. Yet, [the spring hunting lobby] wants us to keep to medieval yardsticks,” he added.
Mark Bonello, for the hunting lobby, said birds would breed between the beginning of May and the end of June. EU member states, he noted, applied a total of about 5,000 derogations.
Spring hunting, he insisted, was sustainable because Malta’s strict quota accounted for less than one per cent of the EU’s turtle dove and quail population. The hunters, he continued, were only asking for 20 mornings and pointed out that BirdLife statistics showed that the number of illegalities had dropped in 2014 when compared to the previous year.
People were free to enjoy the countryside in the afternoons and there were 32 nature reserves which people could opt to visit, Mr Bonello said.
Both sides launched into comparisons with other countries and the debate became particularly heated when Mr Bonello said that six-year-old children could hunt in the UK. He referred to pictures uploaded on the website of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation showing children who shot at rabbits.
Mr Balzan said that, were that the case, he would take his daughter to the UK, buy her a shotgun and allow her to fire away, a comment that was met with laughter by the students present.
Losing the referendum, Mr Balzan added, meant remaining frozen in the past and opening the door to further environmental destruction by developers and others.