Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/451763
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 25 JANUARY 2015 Opinion 22 Opinion H unting 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 Raphael Vassallo 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? It's about wildlife conservation, not satisfying a primal instinct