‘If it flies, it dies’

Ah, bliss. I've been meaning to get that off my chest for ages. But before we all get lost in the female section of Gray's Anatomy: some of you might recognize the above headline (but not, sadly, the reply) as the motto of a car sticker that prompted a minor furore when somebody posted it on Facebook a few weeks ago.

I kept quiet about it at the time because it seemed to me that the general reaction was scathing enough without any additional input on my part. And rightly so. For make no mistake: driving around with a sticker like that is a deliberate act of provocation. It is every bit as effective as a shotgun in getting its message across... and the message itself was aimed (much like a shotgun) at causing as much offence with as little effort as possible.

As such, it is entirely symptomatic of the attitude of a great many (not all, I admit) among the wider hunting community: a cross between genuine sadism, in the sense that these people take visible pleasure in hurting others... and the mischievous impudence of someone who knows he can get away with any amount of illegality, because the country's entire political system is eating out of his hands anyway.

In a nutshell: it is this sort of person - and not the otherwise respectable public face of such lobbies as the FKNK and St Hubert Hunters, etc. - who would shoot not one, but TEN (10) endangered Booted eagles in an afternoon in Buskett (not, mind you, that the species actually matters: if it flies it dies, remember?)

And these people will not give a microscopic toss about such issues as conservation and general respect for wildlife and the natural weal... quite the contrary: the rarer and closer to extinction the more pleasure they will get out of the bird's destruction: and in particular out of the general outcry when their brutish deed gets reported in the press.

This is an aspect of hunting that few people on the outside (as it were) truly understand. Killing birds represents only a small part of the thrill of hunting. The other part of the thrill is caused by simply pissing people off... rubbing our collective noses in the sheer helplessness of the ordinary law-abiding citizen when faced with this wanton disregard for the most basic norms of civility. And the more people complain, the more protected birds they will kill, and the more pleasure they will take in killing them, too.

There is, however, a limit to how much destructive thuggery a country can actually put up with before it finally decides (like Tony Zarb, in a pre-election age when he occasionally remembered being a militant trade unionist) that 'enough is enough'. And when you also realise that all the things you once thought might actually help us evolve beyond this primitive stage turn out to be duds - for instance, EU membership, which came with, oh! So many promises of environmental improvements that never quite materialised.... Well, that's also the moment you finally realise that if this situation is going to improve at all, the improvement will have to be brought about by ourselves, on our own, without any input by an economic bloc that doesn't seem to have any responsibility or competence on any subject other than collecting taxes and telling us how to live our private lives.

But back to the issue at hand. Hunting, in all its manifestations, is something I have been writing about for approximately 15 years. I admit I find myself writing about it a good deal less today than in the 1990s... partly because it made more sense to write about hunting at a time when nobody else in this country (outside of Birdlife Malta and some random nutters here and there) seemed to give a flying flamingo about birds.

Now that everyone and his turtle-dove suddenly appears vitally anxious about the same issue, well, there is less immediate need to draw national attention to this bizarre and anomalous state of affairs. But - Malta being the unconscionably schizophrenic country it is - there is also an inevitable element of political twittery in all this.

When I wrote about the hunting situation 15 years ago, I found myself on the receiving end of public criticism for my pains. This because the basic thrust of my articles at the time - i.e., that government was bending over backwards to placate an ever more unreasonable hunting lobby, while disregarding all environmental and conservation aspects to the issue - was perceived as 'critical of the PN', and therefore 'pro-Labour'.

I have a distinct memory of being accosted at Saddles in Spinola once - which should give you an indication of how long ago this was - by someone who told me to stop 'helping Labour' by criticising the PN's hunting policies. 'People are more important than birds', was the sort of spiel I used to get back then. This was shortly before the 1996 election. You can work out the implications for yourselves.

But, oh look: 15 years later, the same people who interpreted my anti-hunting stance as an act of treachery against 'The Party', are now banging on and on about the same issue themselves. With the Labour Party in power, it is now fashionable to criticise government's hunting policies: in fact I now get criticised for not bashing hunters enough, in an age when hunter-bashing is deemed a legitimate pro-PN exercise. Honestly, if the situation wasn't also vaguely amusing in its own right, the hypocrisy would make me physically sick. But there you go: but a small sample of the illogical inconsistencies of a little group of mostly intellectually challenged people who - believe it or not - considered (and still consider) themselves some kind of elite intelligentsia in this country, which they are entitled to lord over by right divine.

That, I admit, is another thing I've been meaning to get off my chest for years. But back to the Booted eagle massacre. What strikes me now, all these years later, is how very little the same hunting situation has changed. You can admittedly discern a small improvement over the situation in the early to mid-1980s... when a visit to Buskett was like riding into Tombstone, Arizona, on a horse with no name... but from the early 1990s onwards the situation has not only failed to improve: it has actually deteriorated.

Hunters now act with total impunity and undisguised disdain for the law. Not exactly hard to figure out why, either: regardless of who gets to call the shots (ahem) in parliament - and believe me, on this issue there is NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER between the two sides - the law has consistently been tweaked in favour of the hunting lobby, by legislators who quite frankly couldn't give a toss about anything other than securing a few extra votes here and there.

So the hunters get one concession after another: first they're told they can shoot next to secondary roads; then that they can carry more ammo, shoot at more species (not that this matters, seeing as they shoot anything that flies anyway), that their hunting licence fees have been lowered, as has the age at which one can apply for a licence, etc., etc., et-bloody-cetera.

And when we eventually join a European Union that supposedly bans hunting in spring... why, of course our political representatives choose to represent only the hunters - and no one else, not even their own constituents - during negotiations: you know, just to make sure this spoilt and pampered lot keep getting everything they want, when and how they want it, and screw the rest of the frigging country.

And sure enough this persists all the way down to this day. They even got Malta's Attorney General to fight their own case for them in the European Court... and where Malta's Attorney General has traditionally cocked up each and every single case before the same court (Malta has lost around a dozen ECJ cases since we joined the EU), lo and behold! On this occasion he actually pulls his socks up, puts up a legal battle worthy of Perry Mason.... and sure enough, secures the hunters the right to carry on getting away with murder even in spring. Honestly, on this issue alone we were better off before joining the EU. At least there wasn't a European court verdict giving a blanket semblance of legality to the ongoing massacre.

And the upshot of all this hunter-worshipping by our spineless politicians? Every migration season it's the same story. Protected birds massacred, year in, year out. If it's not eagles, it's spoonbills; if not spoonbills, it's storks; if not storks, it's flamingoes; and if not flamingoes, it's swans.

And those are just the ones that get reported.

OK, I know what you're probably thinking. But this time round there's been a small difference, hasn't there? Government did respond... it doubled the penalties for illegal hunting. Surely that's an improvement over the previous way of doing politics? To which the short answer is:

NO.

A slightly longer answer would be this. Reacting to a crime by raising penalties is just another way of simply saying: we have no clue how to actually address this problem... so we'll do something snappy to give the impression that we are responding, even though we secretly know our action will have no real impact on the actual situation in the countryside.

How can raising the penalties possibly make any difference... if you never catch the culprits? And how can you catch the culprits, if the ratio of ALE officers to hunters has hardly changed one iota since 1995 or thereabouts?

Do, da, dum. Naturally, the proper response would have been to double the number of law enforcement officers assigned to monitor the countryside during hunting season. But that would piss off the hunters, and... well... No government, be it Labour or PN, will ever deliberately do that.

In fact it is debatable which of these two superficial, mercenary political institutions have fared worse over the years. The PN spent 25 years in power, and all it ever did was give in to the hunters' every demand. And oh look: among the first policy decisions the 'new' PN took after a change in leadership was to reconfirm itself as a party of hunters, for hunters... despite a golden opportunity to shed that image by supporting a petition to end spring hunting once and for all.

And the saddest part of all this is that in a sense, you can't even blame the political parties for acting this way. The real responsibility lies with the ordinary voter, for persisting in mindlessly supporting their tribal political leaders, regardless what they say or do.

I for one refuse to play that game. It matters little to me if the people wrecking this country happen to rally around a blue or a red flag. In fact it makes no difference at all. Henceforth my vote will only go to parties which actually make an effort to address all the issues what I want to see enacted by a local government. One of these is an end to spring hunting... and believe me: spring hunting is an aberration which will end sooner or later, with or without any Maltese government's say in the matter.

So a small word of advice for aspiring parliamentarians - be they general or European election candidates. Unless an end to spring hunting and a radical overhaul of hunting laws is firmly etched onto your agenda, don't even think of knocking on my door come election time. There are plenty of others who will vote for you... from my end, the days of reluctantly supporting one out of two 'equal evils' are now OVER.