The closure of the trapping and hunting at sea seasons as announced by Rural Affairs and Environment Minister George Pullicino is not a result of the meeting held in Brussels last week but a clear result of the minister’s persistence in pursuing “the wrong road embarked upon” when Legal Notice 79 was issued last March, the Hunters and Trappers Federation said yesterday.

With this policy, the minister is breaking promises made by the Nationalist Party before the last election and EU referendum, and also went against what was suggested to him by the ORNIS committee, which had proposed different dates, the federation added.

This is another reason why the federation had suspended its participation in the said committee.

The government’s behaviour was hindering the federation’s plans for the conservation of the natural environment and the enforcement of regulations, issues that formed an integral part of the “constructive and informative” meeting held in Brussels last week.

The federation had promised it would do its utmost to carry out such initiatives on condition that there were decent hunting regulations in Malta, it added.

The federation announced that it will be issuing directives aimed not only to change the dates of the hunting seasons but also to put pressure on the government to amend Legal Notice 79.