With the spring hunting season mercifully over hunters are already setting their sights on the autumn.
Ahead of the spring hunting referendum, a strong appeal came from the hunters’ federation for the law to be observed. But it seems that birds are devils that appear on this earth to tempt the weak.
Blinded by the flight of a kestrel over a school playground, a man with a gun took the hapless bird down, his passion for killing birds overriding all instruction.
This hunt-crazed individual, aptly nicknamed after a troubled town in a faltering African state, was looking at a year behind bars. The sentence has gone to appeal while the man is out on bail. Permitting such characters to roam the countryside with a loaded gun will always end badly.
“I went crazy (għamejt),” the individual known as il-Benghazi was reported to have said.
Was this temporary insanity or simply unfettered lust for the kill, regardless of any consequences?
Does he regret his crime against nature in full view of a playground of horrified schoolchildren?
There is another question that mildly stirs our curiosity in the longer term. How will the transgressor adapt to a life of no hunting if the one-year jail sentence is to be observed and his hunting licence remains permanently suspended?
Hunters deprived of hunting can fall subject to depression. For example, suicide rates among the hunting populations of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands rose when the seal hunting business was devastated after a successful campaign by Greenpeace and animal rights groups to ban sealskin imports to Europe. Does that make the ban wrong?
Should seals be bludgeoned to death just because some hunter might indulge in self-harm if deprived of these sickly pleasures?
Fairy tale images on referendum billboards put up by Malta’s hunting lobby could have passed as flagrant abuse in their own right before the spring shooting season even got off the ground.
The pro-spring hunt billboards portrayed the hunting community as wholesome and squeaky clean without a ruffle of what really happens in the half light when most of us are safely tucked up in our beds. Not a single drop of blood, not a feather out of place, as families caroused in billboard greenery.
A similar smoke screen was run past Brussels’ Green Week last month with an exhibition of photographs showing wild birds in their natural environment. Posters aimed to show “how hunting has become integrated into diverse sectors of today’s society: restaurants, music, schools, etc”.
One hunter commented that every season from now on would hang on ‘some idiot cropping up’, which they admitted was likely to happen year after year
Bemused Europeans could not be blamed for thinking we do nothing but bake quail pies and sing ballads about the glorious killing of breeding birds.
Well, they brought a keen awareness of hunting to St Edward’s school grounds, without a doubt. It was a fine lesson on the sports track that day, as the bloodied kestrel brought reality crashing down into the school yard.
By their own admission, a Maltese hunter will throw a stone into a tree to flush a resting turtle dove out so it can be shot at. Nothing illegal about that unfortunately, but what a cruel method, if it can be called ‘sport’.
A number of species of protected migrating birds met their death in this spring’s illegal shooting spree, which runs alongside each open season.
Cuckoos, the first casualties of the season this year, are about the size of a dove but more likely to be mistaken for a falcon in flight with their slender body and long tail. They are regular migrants, mostly seen in spring but very rare breeders – only two reports of breeding have been recorded in 16 years.
The lapwing, another victim of the spring shoot, is a regular migrant and winter visitor. A flock of up to 300 birds used to winter annually at Ħal Far but have not been seen there since the late 1970s due to hunting.
The kestrel is a common migrant but breeds only rarely on the Maltese islands. It could become a regular breeder here if only the illegal killing would stop. The species is very adaptable to human presence and is known to breed near human settlements in church domes or man-made nest boxes.
The yellow-legged gull, another bird casualty this spring, is the largest breeding bird of Malta. It breeds in small colonies in cliffs in Malta and Gozo.
When the Prime Minister pulled the curtain down on the spring hunt three days ahead of time, one hunter commented that every season from now on would hang on “some idiot cropping up”, which they admitted was likely to happen year after year.
Another reaction to the closing of the season after a string of illegal incidents was seen among those hunters who say they were at first were willing to report hunting illegalities but were no longer prepared to do this if it meant the spring hunt would be closed early.
“From now on I am not going to be the one to reveal anything that would lead to closing the season,” read a post on the Hunting in Malta forum.
Arguments favouring the spring shoot are often irrational at best.
The most cockeyed of these is the reasoning that “even a bird that is shot in the autumn cannot breed”. This is an off-the-wall retort to the logic that targeted migrants (turtle dove and quail) should not be shot in spring because it is their breeding season.
The autumn season stretches a full five months from September 1 to January 31, targeting 41 species of birds that can be shot on land. The government should at least opt to give spring back to the other half of the country (which voted ‘No’ in the referendum) and to Maltese and European breeding birds.
Three protected birds – a stork, heron and dotterel (a wader shot inside Majjistral Park) – were killed by hunters over the space of four days last September, which led to a suspension of the season to allow safe passage to birds migrating south.
Something on the increase is that, while hunters were using their guns to shoot game birds this spring, some were also capturing images of protected birds on camera. The ones that got away.