You have to love these hunters: my way or the highway is putting it mildly.
No sooner had the groundswell of opinion in favour of having a referendum on whether spring hunting should be banned gained critical mass than up popped the paragons of democratic endeavour, aided and abetted by the pompously named St Hubert's Bird Killers Society (or whatever they're called) to start agitating for the right to a referendum to be denied.
Who do these people think they are?
To be fair, they've been given plenty to convince themselves that they are important in the greater scheme of things, because both the political parties have been sucking up to them since time immemorial, but it's about time that they realised that they are nothing more than a bunch of people who have no greater, and no less, rights than any other bunch of people.
Let's put it in words some of them will understand.
The "right" to hunt is no right at all, it is simply an activity which, to date, is permitted by society at large. Discharging a firearm in public, except in the context of hunting, is a crime, by and large, and if society has decided to permit it up to now, then society may decide, adopting due process, to dis-permit it.
Hunting is not, for instance, to be equiparated to living or being free from oppression or any other fundamental of our existence. It is simply a hobby, an activity, albeit a barbaric one, and one practised by some individuals whose respect for the rule of law and for the rights of others has, in certain cases, been shown to be lacking in the extreme.
Denying these people the right to hunt is, therefore, simply an exercise by society of its right to sanction those of its members who go too far or whose chosen activity is no longer acceptable.
The hunters' apologists will, of course, cry foul and say that the sins of the few should not be visited on the many and such-like guff.
My response to that, frankly, is too late: when Times' photographer Darrin Zammit Lupi, and my son, himself a working photographer at the time, were attacked while covering a hunters' demonstration, the apologists responded by muttering about provocation.
And that was just one instance giving proof positive of the lack of respect for the norms of civil behaviour that constitutes the make-up of people whose motto is "if it flies, it dies".
So, in the immortal words of a union leader who will soon leave the stage himself, "issa daqshekk", enough is enough: let's have the referendum and see if society wants these people to continue getting their way. I will be doing my level best to see that they don't.