With an astounding sense of style, the Federation of Conservationist Hunters, or whatever oxymoronic Orwellian diversion they seek to employ as their name, seized on the individual prowess of a Maltese shooter, William Chetcuti, to try to bask in some reflected glory and poke fun at the real conservationists.
The FKNK (for such is their acronym) saw fit to tell us, while congratulating Chetcuti on his recent gold medal, that he has yet to bag his first legal kill this Spring. I'm mildly surprised that someone who has lofty ambitions in the Olympian stakes has the time, or lack of motivation, to waste precious training time strolling around the countryside trying to kill a bird, but I suppose everyone needs a bit of R'n'R. Hopefully, a sparrow won't fly across the range in 2012 and distract him.
But it's not the FKNK being somewhat opportunistic that inspires me, all amateurish lobby groups and politicians fall for the temptation. What provoked this short piece was my sense of wonderment at the way FKNK thought they would try to be funny by wondering aloud whether Birdlife thought that Chetcuti was a bad shot.
A brief context note: Birdlife, in one of its update on the sporadic lawbreaking that goes on when the hunters are out for their sport (check out the prohibited quarry Birdlife publicises) remarked, with their tongue in their cheek, that the majority of hunters are either lousy shots or they're not reporting their kills. They worked this out by correlating the number of shots heard with the kills reported and, surprise surprise, the numbers didn't add up.
Birdlife was not saying that the majority of hunters are lousy shots: anyone with a command of language or irony would have grasped this. They were inviting people to do the math and observe the extent to which the law was apparently being respected.
Just to jog your memory about why I dislike hunting, you might wish to check out http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20070308/local/hunters-assault-journalists.24239 and the first paragraph of http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20070308/opinion/i-m-beck-quote-unquote.24276. There's more: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20070309/local/pm-condemns-violent-incidents.24135