Do Maltese ‘hunters’ realise that they will soon cause the thrush to be extinct in England?

I live in the south of the Greater London area. I used to hear the thrush tapping the shell of snails on my patio but no longer.

We have not seen a single thrush for six years or more. This is because ‘hunters’ in Malta are allowed to indulge themselves by killing 5,000 song thrushes a year. What is the consequence? Thrushes are disappearing and we are inundated by snails.

The snails eat our vegetables. They completely consume fresh, new bedding plants and eat the leaves and petals of many flowers. They even crawl up our fruit trees and suck the fruit and all this because there are no thrushes to eat them.

The risk of extinction applies to all the other wild birds the ‘hunters’ shoot in their thousands. Have the ‘hunters’ considered that we may be inundated with insects as a result of all the birds being killed? Surely the hunters could give this some deep thought.

The accent nowadays is supposed to be on biodiversity.