It’s about wildlife conservation, not satisfying a primal instinct

Hunting has always posed a bit of a dilemma to me personally. OK, so this creature we call ‘Man’ spent around 200,000 years of his (only marginally longer) existence on this planet depending on hunting wild animals for his own survival. And OK, this inevitably endowed our species with a primal instinct which propels us to kill other animals for pleasure.

Well, this leads me to believe that I might not be entirely human. As a child I was guilty (as children often are) of occasional acts of animal cruelty; I once shot a gecko on the roof, using a makeshift rubber-band catapult with a hairpin for ammo. And a crack shot I turned out to be with that little weapon, too. Got it straight on the head with my first shot, and pinned it to the wall. But this random act of savagery did not sate any primal instinct that I could detect. On the contrary, I spent around the next 15 years racked by guilt at this murder most foul. 

What if that gecko was female, and had a nest of baby geckos depending on their mother for their survival? And what if, at the very moment I let fly that lethal hairpin, its victim was quietly meditating on the nature of the universe… which is what it looked like it was doing at the time… and was just about to stumble upon a revelation that had so far eluded the greatest philosophical minds in human history? Etc. etc.

In any case: clearly I was not cut out to be a hunter, and would probably have been perfectly useless as a member of a hunter-gatherer community 40,000 years ago. But it would be futile to deny that hunting is indeed a source of enjoyment to many people. Even if I don’t experience the same thrill myself, I can still envisage how that primal instinct might seem like an irresistible compulsion to others. And there are other aspects of the pastime I can more or less appreciate, too. 

Dogs, for instance: the bond between the hunter and the retriever, which is of a far more subtle and meaningful nature than the ordinary bond between any old man and his dog. And I can understand the appeal of the early morning appointment with nature in its multitudinous aspects: the call of the countryside, the smell of wild thyme on your boots, and all that.

Hence the dilemma. I can fully understand that there is a strong emotional attachment to hunting. Were it not for the part that involves actually shooting birds, I would probably enjoy a spot of ‘hunting’ here and there myself. In fact… heck, why not? I’m going to have a shot at it right now.

But I won’t be shooting any birds. First off, I happen to sympathise with the view famously (though questionably) attributed to Mohammed Ali in 1966, when he was called up for compulsory military service in Vietnam: “No Vietcong ever called me nigger”. 

I feel entirely the same way about turtle doves. To the best of my knowledge, no member of the ‘Streptopelia turtur’ species ever insulted me, or deliberately (even accidentally) pissed me off in any conceivable way. I harbour no ill-feeling of any kind towards quail, either; or any other feathered creature hatched out of an egg. So why the heck would I want to kill any? 

So instead, I’ll take aim at the many misconceptions and logical fallacies that are flying about in great flocks at the moment, as Malta gears up for a referendum on spring hunting next April. These are after all far more numerous than the paltry numbers of turtle dove or quail to fly over Malta in spring; so there is nothing unsustainable about blasting them out of the sky.

So let’s sit here in our imaginary hunting hide, and wait for…

Ooh, that was quick. The first quarry has already flown into view. You can see it in the comments section under every article about hunting ever written in Malta:

‘Opposing spring hunting is hypocritical, because you all ate turkey over Christmas… (and all sorts of other birds at all times of the year)’.

Yes, you still hear that argument from time to time. I probably invited it myself, a few lines further up. That bit about ‘no turtle dove having ever harmed me’? Well, the turkey I ate over Christmas certainly never harmed me, either – in fact, we never even met. Nor did I ever meet the pig whose hide was the source of the leather currently encasing my I-pad. Does this make the argument hypocritical?

The short answer is… no. The argument against hunting in spring has nothing to do with ‘animal cruelty’ (as do arguments regarding animal breeding for human consumption). The concern here is with conservation of wildlife, and the two issues are very different.

The Christmas turkey was a bird, no doubt about that. But it was not taken from the wild. It was bred in captivity, for the sole purpose of being eaten. No populations of wild turkey were harmed or even remotely affected during the making of my Christmas lunch. Same goes for the pig, too.

Same goes also for the unquantifiable number of bulls slaughtered each year in Spain during bullfights… and which are also routinely trotted out as arguments to legitimise spring hunting. Again, the analogy is completely flawed. Those bulls do not migrate annually over Spain as they head homeward to breed. They are bred in large ranches across the country… all you have to do is drive out of Madrid to see the first of several million ‘Cuidado Al Toro’ signs dotted around La Mancha.

Does this mean there is no argument against bullfighting? Of course not. It is a cruel sport, in which an animal is literally tortured to death. I would certainly vote to ban the practice on those grounds. But the two arguments are not interchangeable. And this brings me to the second misconception, for which I paraphrase another online comment:

“Why single out spring hunting, when autumn hunting is allowed? What difference does it make if you kill a bird on its way to Africa, or on its way to Europe?”

If the arguments against spring hunting were indeed based on ‘cruelty to animals’, the answer would be… none at all. But, as already explained, that is not the argument. From a conservation point of view, there is an enormous difference between the two seasons. And the difference affects not just an individual bird, but the species as a whole.

Nature, as we know, is a cruel phenomenon. The migration towards Africa is fraught with perils for the individual birds involved. Being shot over Malta is but a small part of the hurdles they face… they get caught up in storms, they are preyed upon by predators (including other migrating birds), they die of exhaustion, they die of thirst. Migration is, in fact, one of nature’s ways to weed out the weak and genetically inferior specimens within the species. It’s hard on the individual – life is tough out there in the natural weal – but necessary for the well-being of the species as a whole. 

So when a bird is shot as it flies towards its nesting grounds in Europe, it will be part of the cream of that species’ crop: the ones which survived the perilous crossing, and return with the wealth of their genetic information to pass onto the next generation. Picking out those specimens at this crucial stage is therefore akin to gradually weakening the entire species. 

That, incidentally, is the reason why spring hunting is illegal in Europe… and the fact that we ‘derogate’ from European law itself attests to its illegality.  

Even from a local ecological perspective, the practice can be seen to have impacted Malta’s current bio-diversity. The number of resident breeding birds in Malta has dwindled drastically in the last 50 years. Earlier ornithologists (Wright, Despott, et al) record infinitely greater numbers of both breeding and migratory birds in former decades and centuries. Even within living memory, birds such as barn owls and kestrels used to breed (and still sporadically try) in Malta. There have even been recorded attempts of turtle dove trying to breed. Yet there is no resident population of turtle dove in Malta today.

Why is that, I wonder? They didn’t like the weather, perhaps? They were put off by the confrontational nature of Maltese politics? Or could it be that no bird can realistically expect to start up a breeding population, in a country where birds are systematically shot precisely as they are trying to nest?

Amazingly, though, this is another of the fallacious arguments in defence of spring hunting in Malta... an argument used by the Maltese government (unsuccessfully) in the European Court of Justice case in 2008.

Malta should be permitted to derogate from the Birds directive, because the autumn season is not a ‘satisfactory solution’ to spring. In other words, we need to shoot more birds… because there are not enough birds to shoot.

Hmmm. Yes, wonderful logic there. So if the population of, say, lampuki were to dwindle to a point where the autumn fishing season would be insufficient… the obvious solution would be to catch them just as they are about to replenish the population during the breeding season. Yes, that would guarantee a recovery of lampuki stocks during autumn, wouldn’t it? Make sure there are fewer specimens to breed this year, so that – obviously – there will be more specimens to fish for the next.

Is it possible that no one can see the flaw in that argument? Has it really never occurred to anyone that the autumn season is so paltry precisely because we permit those birds to be killed at the most critical stage of their life-cycle?

And that’s not the only logical fallacy to shoot in that argument. If autumn is not good enough a season for turtle dove or quail, it only means that Malta, as a migratory destination, is not a good place to target those two species. Yet there are around 10,000 hunters licensed to shoot what they themselves acknowledge is an ‘insufficient’ species. How is that in any way sustainable? 

The truth is that spring hunting is NOT sustainable, and the hunters’ own argument is the main proof. It prevents birds like turtle dove from successfully breeding locally – and not for want of trying, either. If these birds were given half a chance to actually breed, the prospects for autumn might be very different. A resident breeding population would guarantee regular numbers which – not necessarily the case for birds breeding in other countries – will definitely return to Malta in autumn. 

This in turn implies that it is in the hunters’ own interest to ban hunting in spring. Or at least, it would be, if conservation of wildlife featured anywhere in their concerns. But it doesn’t. The only thing that is of any concern to them is that ‘primal instinct’ I mentioned earlier.

And against such a hopelessly irrational, emotive force… even the gods are powerless.