A recent report claiming more than 100,000 birds were illegally shot last year is “exaggerated, fallacious and far from reality”, the hunting lobby said yesterday.
In two strongly worded statements, the hunters’ federation, FKNK, and the St Hubert’s Hunting Association, KSU, claimed a report by Birdlife International was damaging to Malta and based on “inaccurate information”.
The study, called The Killing, found that Malta had the highest concentration of illegal hunting incidents: an average of around 108,000 each year.
This, the report found, translated into 340 dead birds per square kilometre, 20 times the number in Italy.
The FKNK said it had commissioned an independent review of the report’s findings by local ornithologists, who it said had “rubbished” the findings. It called on the authorities to stop what it described as deliberately inaccurate information from being published.
Putting it very mildly, this figure is not just grossly inflated, but fabricated
The hunting lobby’s main bone of contention with the report’s findings is that it included birds shot under the spring hunting derogation, turtle doves and quail, as “illegally killed birds”.
It questioned whether Bird-life felt it was above EU law, as Brussels had sanctioned the spring hunting practice.
The Birdlife report found that while Malta did not make the top 10 list of countries responsible for ‘illegal’ bird deaths, it was disproportionally high when it came to hunting offences.
The FKNK also said that the data had been publically available for several months but had been rehashed and released to the media in this latest report.
The FKNK said that in a statement issued when the information was first available back in December, it had said: “Putting it very mildly, this figure is not just grossly inflated, but fabricated.”
KSU condemned the “vile propaganda”, meanwhile, and while noting that the adverse publicity attributed to Malta as “Europe’s black spot” or “bird hell” was untrue, it called on Birdlife to “stick to the truth and spare Malta the embarrassment and harm of their anti-hunting extremism”.