The season to be Ornis

Some people seem surprised that Labour MEP candidate Cyrus Engerer would have collected 1,600 signatures for an FKNK petition to block a referendum on spring hunting.

I can’t see why myself. It is after all the beginning of spring – or should be, though it hasn’t seemed to notice yet – and as we all know, spring is the season when Love is in the air: firing a starting pistol for courtship rituals among all animals, great and small.

The birds and the bees, the wolves and the sheep, the lions and the unicorns, the walruses and the carpenters, the dormice and the March hares… now is when they all engage in complex and amusing courtship rituals of their own; and I see no reason why politicians and hunting lobbies should be excluded from all the fun.

Besides: Cyrus Engerer is hardly the first politician to do a little courtship dance in a bid to attract the hunters’ attention, either. His team-mate John Attard Montalto held regular frolics – I mean, meetings – with the same lobby before the last MEP election in 2009. Even earlier, former Health Minister Louis Deguara was regularly heard warbling for votes in his largely rural constituency… as was Tony Abela (note: the PN former MP from Rabat, not the current Labour deputy leader for party affairs… who is currently rumoured to be investing in nail-proof body armour, to ward off physical attacks by a certain Fenech, Anne).

All joined in the chorus of mating calls that inevitably precedes a spring election; in fact you can almost talk about it as an initiation rite for all prospective candidates, regardless of political plumage. While other esoteric cults get their initiates to dress up in Ku Klux Klan outfits, or send them out to hunt the spirit of the White Buffalo, Labour and PN initiates are expected to set off in hunt for the electoral support of an equally tribal and atavistic community… and not to return until they place a suitable gift offering at their altar.

It goes all the way back to 1996, when George Vella – then also a deputy Labour leader – set the standards for all future courtship rituals by committing the Labour Party to a pre-electoral agreement with the hunters… and we all know what happened next. So it is kind of unsurprising that this self-same ritual, with only minor variations, has been repeated by both political parties ahead of every single election ever since.

I still can’t shake off the memory of a televised ‘debate’ (Xarabank, I think) between PN’s George Pullicino and Labour’s Roderick Galdes in the 1990s… in which the aim was apparently to determine which side could heap more offerings and lavish gifts upon the hunting community, in return for an open show of electoral support.

At one point Pullicino produced the picture of a goose (very apt, I remember thinking at the time) and accused his Labour counterpart of offering the hunters prey that didn’t even migrate over Malta. Galdes returned fire by accusing Pullicino of making promises he knew he couldn’t keep in the light of his party’s EU membership bid… and on it went.

At no point whatsoever did either politician even acknowledge the existence – still less make it any offerings – of a much larger voter segment that would have preferred to see the same operation in reverse: i.e., two parties competing with each other over how to better control and contain a hunting situation that was by then already wildly out of control.

From these and other unsightly gift-exchange ceremonies, the hunters eventually walked away with (among other goodies): an increase in the number of permissible species to shoot (bear in mind that this was before EU accession); the removal of a ban on shooting near secondary roads; the lowering of the minimum age to apply for a hunting licence; a promise that ‘the hunting laws would not change’ (with the following important proviso: ‘but if they did change, it would be to the hunters’ advantage’); and a lengthening of the ‘autumn’ season, so that it now stretches all the way into January.

This last achievement is graphically revealing of the sheer extent of quasi-mythological power exerted to this day by the hunting lobby. In order to make autumn last until mid-winter it was necessary to also redefine the four seasons… which are in turn the result of our planetary orbit around the sun. I would have thought re-choreographing the dance of the heavenly spheres was somewhat beyond the powers of a Maltese government… or any government, for that matter. And yet they succeeded: thus amply proving that in their eagerness to accommodate hunters in all things, both political parties would be perfectly willing to move not only mountains, but also the entire solar system.

Placed in this context, Cyrus Engerer’s little collection on behalf of FKNK is not only unsurprising in the extreme, but almost perfectly predictable. And to be honest, it doesn’t even begin to compare with the exploits of others.

A week earlier, the Do-I-Make-You-Ornis Committee ‘decided’ to permit the opening of a spring hunting season this year. (All together now: “Groovy, baby, yeah”). Please note, however, the trademark Dr Evil quotation marks (Dr Evil being the inventor of the ‘laser’, if you’ll remember) for the word ‘decided’… because the actual decision was not taken last week, nor even by the Ornis Committee. It was taken by the Labour Party before the last election, and Ornis’s job was merely to sign on the dotted line.

For the less birdbrained among us, the Ornis Committee is a non-constituted body comprising representatives of hunters’ organisations and Birdlife Malta, and also (hugely important little detail) three government appointees. Its purpose is supposed to be to review the logistical and scientific data pertaining to bird migration and hunting statistics – stuff like, the conservation status of huntable birds like turtle dove and quail, the number of licensed hunters, the number of reported shots/kills per season, etc – to determine, on the basis of all this data, whether or not the conditions are in place to apply a derogation from the Birds Directive under Article 9.1.

I won’t comment on previous decisions, other than to say that (surprise!) they were all identical… but I have taken a closer look at last week’s decision, and it was very evidently not based on any scientific data at all.

For rather obvious reasons, the decision to allow the hunting of turtle dove and quail in spring must take into consideration existing threats to both these species in the wild. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to a condemnation of both species to endangerment.

Both European turtle dove and European quail are rated as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in decline’ in the European conservation status index. And please note that I emphasise ‘European’ so much in that sentence because the birds shot in Malta are on their way to breed in Europe… making these the statistics most relevant to the issue of spring hunting in Malta.

And yet, the data furnished to the Ornis Committee – compiled by the hunters, naturally – refers to a global conservation index (the IUCN list) for both species… in which they enjoy a ‘favourable’ status rating. Personally I am delighted to hear that such marvellous birds enjoy no threat of extinction on a global level. But that takes into consideration Asian, African and American populations… which are not in any way affected by hunting in Malta. 

Ornis was aware of this situation when it gave the go ahead to hunt two vulnerable European species of bird during this year’s breeding season. Its reasons cannot possibly have been based on any of the information that actually matters.

This brings me to the composition of Ornis, which, as mentioned earlier, is heavily weighted in favour of government appointees. Government is bound by an electoral pledge to permit spring hunting, and has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t give a tawny owl’s hoot about birds, and even less about scientific mumbo jumbo and conservation gobbledygook. And its representatives on the committee owe their allegiance to government, not to Mother Nature.

From this perspective, one wonders why they even bother keeping up the pretence of a decision taken afresh each year. They may as well just scrap the committee altogether, and simply announce that spring hunting will take place from now to eternity, regardless if there are any birds left to shoot. (The hunters can always find something else to compensate, if that famous scene from the Fantozzi movies is anything to go by).

This is not a serious, credible way to take sensitive decisions on issues that affect other populations beside that of turtle dove and quail… or for that matter that of hunters, or even of the Maltese people as a whole. Those are European birds, remember? They breed in other countries, and if their decline escalates any further as a result of the Ornis Committee’s decision – and these things are monitored, you know – the responsibility will be partly ours.

Faced with all this, I can’t say I even blame Cyrus Engerer for playing his own predictable part in the unending courtship ritual between hunters and politicians. Besides, like all the other suitors he would have made his own calculations, and concluded that the votes gained from the initiative would outnumber the votes lost by an order of magnitude.

Going on past elections, his arithmetic is entirely correct, too. Sticking up for hunters earns votes; sticking up for the rest of the country costs elections. This is how it has always panned out over the past 20 years; and I have not seen any indication that this election may be any different.

So at the end of the next May, we will have six EP representatives (unless, to be fair, AD elects a candidate) who will be likewise committed to furthering the cause of some 12,000 hunters and their extended clans, while completely overlooking the remaining 99% of the country.

This is why I can only conclude that the hunters have all along played their cards well, while the rest of us have made a pipit’s breakfast of ours. Threatening politicians has a long history of success in this country; and on an issue as important as this, it is only fair that two get to play at that game.

So a final bird – I mean, word – to all prospective MEP candidates of all feathers. Unless taking a firm stand against spring hunting features prominently on your to-do-list in Brussels, please don’t bother issuing any mating calls under my window. Gracias.