It just had to happen. Joseph Muscat gave hunters the push they needed in a spring hunting referendum that should have been all about migrating birds and nothing to do with local politics, and then took it away to deny them three days of blooded pleasure.

That the Prime Minister played God once on this issue is unfortunate, but that he’s done so twice smacks of contrived coincidence. Especially in the wake of a churlish comment he decided to make in a misguided effort to rub salt in the anti-spring hunting media’s wounds immediately after it became known that the Yes camp won by a slither.

The result should make the media rethink (actually he was more pointed than that), he said, how they should approach such campaigns in future.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. Unlike him, the media that supported a No vote did not do so because they were after a voting bloc which he has managed to harness. We did so because we are opposed the killing of birds while they attempt to breed.

Being in the media is not about siding with the majority, it is about standing for what one believes is right.

While this is, of course, subjective – and the world is a much richer place when countries permit this to be the case – it does not matter a jot whether they have the backing of an army or of a solitary human being. The only thing that matters is that they are allowed to voice their opinion.

And what was the opinion in this case? Not only that it is wrong to shoot birds (many would stop there) during the season in which they attempt to increase the size of their population, but that it is wrong to permit such a practice when space is as limited as it is in Malta and when there are so many in the hunting community who so nonchalantly and persistently break the rules. This is a stand firmly founded on principle.

If only the same could be said for the Prime Minister. Recognising that half the voting public chose to ignore his less than subtle attempts to swing the vote in favour of the Yes camp, he said that hunters had been given “one last chance” to hunt in spring. But this soundbite was as far removed from principled as hunters are from conservation.

No sooner had the hunting season opened, than an owl was shot. Other incidents followed and a teenage boy was slightly injured by shotgun pellets just last week. What happened to one last chance, Prime Minister? Or were they not sufficiently close enough to the end of the season – there were just three days to go when the government called a halt to it yesterday – to make any action politically viable?

And in any case, what does one last chance mean? In anyone’s book it would mean precisely that – one last chance.

Not the last chance to get a three-day slap on the wrist; not a last chance to enable a Prime Minister to flex some muscle; but a last chance to flout what has been flouted for years: the rules that govern the already unacceptable practice of spring hunting.

If he wants to be taken seriously, the penalty for such repeated expressions should extend far beyond three days. It should be permanent. But that seems about as likely as hunters committing no more offences during next year’s spring hunting season.

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