Hunters plan to ignore SMS obligation and shoot at will

Hunters who have spoken to MaltaToday say they have been urged by leading members of the hunting community to underreport (or not report at all) any birds shot in the 18-day hunting period that is to start on 13 April.

As the controversial spring hunting season gets underway, Maltese and Gozitan hunters will be expected to register each bird they shoot down by sending an sms to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority (MEPA) – a system that is expected to allow the authority to keep tabs on how much quail and turtle dove (limited to 2,500 and 9,000 respectively), can be bagged by some 10,000 licensed hunters.

But this ‘modern’ carnet de chasse is already being ridiculed by hunters, because they understand it offers a golden opportunity for abuse.

Illegal hunting – shooting protected birds – is already widely practised, as evidenced by several bird-watching camps organised by BirdLife Malta and the Campaign Against Bird Slaughter. Now that government has decided to open the 18-day hunting period, conservationists and hunters alike know the catch will far exceed the imposed quota.

“There will no way to confirm what is being shot. Also expect protected birds to be massacred in this period,” a hunter told MaltaToday.

The use of SMSes for collating carnet de chasse figures was haphazardly devised by Richard Cachia Caruana, Malta’s permanent representative to Brussels and a top strategist for the Nationalist party.

In Europe, bag quotas are regulated by a law that obliges hunters to place closed rings on shot birds. Each hunter is given an individual quota (unlike the general quota being applied by Malta for the entire hunting community) and asked to apply a closed ring on the shot bird. If searched by an enforcement officer, the hunter would be obliged to show that any birds shot were in fact ringed.

A senior government official (who did not want to be quoted), told MaltaToday that the derogation had been introduced as an electoral ploy, and that the European Commission would eventually still find Malta’s derogation unsustainable in the long run. 

Yesterday, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi welcomed a delegation led by Lino Farrugia from the hunter’s federation at Castille.

On Friday, the government issued a legal notice opening an 18-day spring hunting season between the 13 and 30 April. Police figures show that there were 10,387 licensed hunters during the 2010 autumn hunting season who can now all apply for a spring hunting licence.

They are expected to shoot just 10,500 birds, as the limit set for spring is inversely proportionate to the amount of birds shot down the preceding autumn. This new mechanism, laid down in the framework legislation, comes thanks to the European Court of Justice’s recognition that autumn did not provide a suitable alternative to the spring migration.

Indeed, while the government and the former Attorney General Silvio Camilleri had argued to the ECJ that the numbers shot down in the autumn were insignificant, people like Natalino Fenech, today PBS head of news, argued in his book ‘Fatal Flight’ that hunters shot up to 32,000 quail and 420,000 turtle dove the whole year round.   

Hunters have been a strong lobby and the major political parties have made it a point not to irk the hunting vote.  The Labour party and namely John Attard Montalto who managed to scrape through the European elections has promised that Malta will find ways of retaining hunting in Spring.