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The official dates for the autumn and winter hunting and trapping seasons have been officially agreed upon by the Ornis Committee and blessed by Minister George Pullicino, MaltaToday can reveal.
The new seasons will kick off on September 1 and end on January 31, effectively signalling that trapping and hunting at sea in spring will finally come to an end.
The negotiated position between Malta and the EU already commits the Maltese government to stop all trapping in 2008.
The dates for spring hunting on land will have to be discussed at a forthcoming Ornis Committee meeting. A decision to go for hunting in spring will be counter to EU directives.
The Ornis Committee, which is now chaired by lawyer Tonio Azzopardi, fell short of adding new species to the list of specially protected birds or reducing the number of days hunting can take place in the autumn.
This will be the second time that spring trapping has been banned, but this time round it’s the Birds Directive that weighs heavily on the government’s thinking.
The decision to ban trapping in spring will definitely lead to a backlash, especially in rural towns and villages were the population of trappers is high. The next local council elections will surely see a reaction that will damage the Nationalist Party in the localities of Gharghur, Marsaxlokk, Mosta, Safi, Siggiewi and the Gozitan villages of Kercem, Munxar, Qala, San Lawrenz, Xaghra and Zebbug.
There is also a great fear that many hunters will respond to the pressures of the EU directives by acting viciously and continue to shoot indiscriminately on protected birds.
Long considered to be a rubber-stamping organisation, the Ornis Committee’s decision serves primarily to deflect the flak levelled against government. The Ornis Committee groups scientific experts, along with the representatives of BirdLife Malta and the hunters’ federation (FKNK), to deliberate over the conservation of birds and the effects of hunting.
But the end of trapping in the spring also serves as a prelude to the far bigger decision to ban spring hunting. It will change the Maltese and Gozitan countryside as we know it and open up acres of land to ramblers who were previously hindered from walking over large areas of public land being squatted by trappers. It will also serve to give a chance for avifauna to return to the depleted Maltese habitats.
The changes to the autumn and winter dates will also lead to the end of shooting at sea in February, one of the main reasons for the massacre of so many protected birds.
The EU Commission argued that Malta does not have a reliably good justification for applying what is technically called a derogation – effectively an exemption from the spirit of the Birds Directive.
The Commission is adamant that Malta should not open its hunting season in spring of next year. But with an election looming, the Nationalist government is in no mood of upsetting the hunters’ wrath: it could well be far too late.
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