Issues - 01/09/2002

Skating on thin ice

Is hunting ever going to be assimilated as just another cultural phenomenon of our community? Should it be a banned outright? What, if anything, can be done to make it sustainable. What will it take to make the doom and gloom mongers stop their wholly negative propaganda? This article explores a few of the possible avenues.

Whenever hunting is discussed in Malta, it always raises tempers and passions. This in itself is a good topic for discussion. Why should we feel so strongly about it? It is almost as though there is something embedded in our subconscious. People have shot at and sometimes actually killed each other over hunting rights on hired land, territorial infringements and sheer, downright cussedness.

Nothing brings home the notion that we are a nation of hotheads a la Don Camillo and Peppone more forcefully than the hunting issue. The cherry on the parfait, however, goes to the hunter who was arrested for shooting in the direction of people who had strayed onto his turf. The excuse he gave for his actions? He apologised for shooting on his compatriots; he had directed a volley of buckshot at them because – wait for it – he had thought they were tourists. That makes it ok, then.

Make no mistake, those sanctimonious types who so vociferously oppose hunting are just as hotheaded as the hunters. Most, but not all of them generally refuse to see reason and to respect the fact that hunters actually do have a legal and traditional right to hunt. They appoint themselves as the protectors and martyrs to the cause of all things avian.

Because of this, birds are elevated to the rarefied status of quasi saints. We imagine them having these intellectual conversations while they fly in flocks, ever keeping a lookout for well-hidden Maltese hunters. Some of them even read Shakespeare while on the wing, no doubt.

One other important consideration that is often conveniently forgotten is the question of fishing; how many of those who eagerly stand up to be counted when it comes to condemning hunting indulge in a little fishing off their favourite quay on the side? Let he who has committed no sin throw the first stone .

On the other hand, the recent slaughter of the swans and flamingos serves as a grisly reminder that many hunters do regularly abuse the privileges granted to them by the country. For privileges they are. The country, in a very generous and elastic expression of democracy, created a framework in which some citizens are given the right to kill part of a pool of birds which belongs to everyone and which most would like to see unharmed. This gigantic majority force could just as easily have decreed that since most people do not want our birds to be shot out of the sky, then hunting ought to be banned outright.

Hunters and trappers should not forget that they are allowed to practice their hobby on sufferance. Somebody recently suggested that since, hunters are volatile, ready to blackmail either party, and electorally unreliable then the regulation of hunting should be applied to the full limit of the law, as stipulated by international treaties. Their situation is that fragile and it could be changed overnight – hunters and trappers would do well to remember that they are skating on very thin ice.

Somewhere in between these extremes lies the concept of sustainable hunting and trapping.

If the abuse had to be curtailed, then hunting would almost immediately become partly sustainable. Other things would have to be modified too, such as the laughably generous open seasons allowed to the hunters, some of which are actually in spring. Making hunting sustainable can go beyond these immediate measures, however. It can be controlled to ease the practically unchecked drain on the stock of wild local and transient birds. For that to happen, however, the hunters have to show the will to limit their activity so that it falls within realistic predetermined limits, and the anti-hunting lobby has to stop depicting hunting as an evil activity which, preferably, should be brought to a complete standstill. It is a consolation to note that part of the anti-hunting lobby wants simply to control it, rather than abolish it. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from the knights who created the Buskett woodland with the express purposes of cultivating it in order to hunt deer several hundred years ago.