The hunting season opens, and less than 24 hours go by before the first angry hunter, who by his own admission on Facebook has never felt as “mentally unwell” as he did in the weeks before the referendum, takes out his pent-up rage on a poor, unsuspecting cuckoo. He would have done it to any bird, protected or unprotected, but it was cuckoo that happened to fly past and get blasted, even though it is protected at law, and even though it’s open season only on turtle doves and quails.
Stefan Micallef lamented on his Facebook page that he can’t understand why, when there are thousands of hunters throughout Europe and hundreds of thousands of birds, it’s the “two turtledoves” which he shoots in the season that seem to be a problem. Mr Micallef must have been really bad at arithmetic at school besides failing to understand conservation issues or know that Malta is the only EU member state where hunting is permitted during the spring migration season.
The question the rest of us should be asking is why a grown man in his 40s, with a wife and two children to support, would want to use his precious holiday leave – at least, I hope it is his holiday leave; he is a Maltapost employee – roaming round with a gun waiting for turtledoves and quails that never show up to be shot (the way he puts it), while trembling with frustration and indignation at the sight of all those birds they aren’t allowed to shoot.
“We eat everything we shoot”, hunters tell me, missing the point that we don’t give a damn because eating what you shoot is not the same thing at all as shooting to eat. They can all get a chicken at the supermarket, so exactly how is it relevant that they eat the quails and turtledoves they kill? It isn’t. It would make no difference at all were they to leave them there dead to rot. On two turtledoves per bag, they’d starve, so God bless supermarkets and their freezers.
This is the first popular vote I know of in which nobody wants to take ownership of the victory and nobody wants to take ownership of the loss. Joseph Muscat is at pains to let us know that it’s not his fault the Yes vote won (if they had won by a large majority, he would be keen to claim ownership). Saviour Balzan is at pains to let us know that it’s not his fault that the No vote lost – rather, that it’s the prime minister’s fault.
The hunters were out celebrating but even they were relatively low-key about it, pleased about the victory but more than a little subdued at the realisation that roughly half of those who voted did so against them. Their leader then tried that old trick, first wheeled out by the unlamented Alfred Sant, of adding the no-shows and the invalid votes to the Yes votes to conclude that the majority of those who “are not against hunting in spring” is actually much larger. Joe Perici Calascione added that he and his people will be lobbying the government to change the law on referendums, so that “the minority will not be subjected to the will of the majority”. And there he went unwittingly to the heart of why the No campaign failed: it should never have been about hunters and hunting, because the crux of the matter is birds. And the conservation of species is definitely a valid matter for a referendum and has nothing at all to do with minorities and minority rights.
The No campaign messed up because its leaders wittingly or unwittingly took the issue down the very road it should have avoided: playing the hunters’ own game of turning the matter into one of whether hunters have a right to shoot in spring. Birds, conservation and the lead in soil where our vegetables are grown were nowhere in the debate, but they should have been the sole subjects, with hunters hovering in the background as the quasi-incidental reason for the damage. Hunters would have been unable to fight back against those valid reasons, but when the campaign was turned into a battle of ‘minority rights’ and ‘hunters’ rights’ their chances of winning increased and win they did.
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