Kenneth Cassar's It's Right To Teach That Hunting Is Wrong (January 16) cannot be accepted as stated at face value.

The question concerning the practice of hunting in Malta has, most unfortunately, become an undeniably loaded one. To invade state and Church schools for the direct purpose of enlisting their manifest assistance to bolster the anti-hunting lobby surely runs against the correct interpretation of the curriculum as agreed upon by the Education Division and Education Minister Louis Galea.

To seek unquestioning patronage from members of the teaching profession entails also the indirect selective assistance of the Malta Union of Teachers.

For surely here we are up against a baleful select manner of interpreting the meaning of ethics when and where violence is intrinsically involved.

Much ado is made of Maltese hunters, their ways and interests, their failings, true or perceived. It is not my intention to break a lance in their favour but the whole hullabaloo deserves a more rational approach. Instead of crying for hell's fire to fall upon their heads, why don't we seek and have more factual information?

To have Malta's name blackened to such a dire degree by people living in European northern latitudes calls more for unbiased factual data resulting from properly conducted research rather than selective use of an act of violence enshrined in a perceived ethical context.

Indeed, let birds of song enrich the land with their warbles. Let the migratory birds follow their chosen paths; but why single out the comparatively small hunting group in Malta but turn more of a blind eye as to what happens from Sicily northward? That is not the end of it all.

Toying with violence in the context of calling upon the sustenance of ethics should lead us to also consider that this perspective involves much, much more than migratory birds and hunting, and that means in Europe and beyond its limited confines.

The deaths of the unborn in their mother's womb, the wailing of dying non-combatants as a result of sophisticated modern weaponry, the bloated stomachs of people plagued by hunger, and man's perennial inhumanity to man on a global scale, all breathe violence regardless of all accepted norms of ethics. These aspects of contemporary "globalisation" also deserve the attention of school teachers and those responsible for drawing up the respective syllabi.