The decision by the European Court of Justice, welcomed by the European Commission and the saner sections of Maltese society, to ban hunting and trapping in spring is precisely one of the reasons why the Maltese population voted over and over again to join the European Union.

To put it bluntly, as there is no other way of putting it, this was to drag Malta out of the Neanderthal and mediaeval times of the past decades into a world made more peace-loving, less fundamentalist, less nationalistic, culturally more advanced and with a far higher standard of living than was possible after all the belt-tightening, austerity and import substitution of the past.

Like some other aspects of our national life, hunting is a throw-back to an atavistic past, and has persisted, nay spread, because of one fault-line in our recent history: as long as we stood on our own, proud in our independence, we went into regression, rather than progressed as we should have, as we had it in us to do. Like what happened at the local political level, like what happened in our economy, like what happened and is happening in the non-political aspects of our society, we needed to open up, we needed to break the mould.

The saner among us realised that we could never do it on our own: the insular, traditional, dare we say it savage, sides of our national psyche would have won and won again and again. The only solution was, still is, to join a bloc big and strong enough to make us change our ways.

And that is where hunting and trapping comes in.

Let everybody be clear: the EU is not about to ban all kinds of hunting and trapping, even though for many of us such pastimes are gross. What the EU aims to do is to make hunting and trapping sustainable, just as the EU tries (and again does not wholly succeed with Maltese and other fishermen) to make fishing of certain species of fish sustainable.

Which is precisely where spring hunting comes in? Spring is not just the migration season but also the breeding season.

Banning hunting and trapping in spring is one way to bring under control the trigger-happy Maltese hunters who shoot at anything and everything, young and old, pregnant or not, at risk of extinction or common as sparrows. There are, of course, other methods of controlling this shooting spree but none of them would work unless there is cooperation and honesty all around.

With typical male-offended psychology, the hunting community reacts by saying it was tricked at EU accession and, with typical Maltese xenophobic tendencies, it also reacts against people from all over civilised Europe who are giving up on us and especially those who come to see and document for themselves what may be Europe’s last primitives.

Well, if they want to play the offended, let them, but even an EU derogation was never intended to be permanent, nor was it going to be offered without a specific reason for it. That said, those who were cavalier with the truth in the negotiations have a burden to carry.

Beyond such specious arguments, however, there is so much more to say than to listen to the trite and hurt arguments put up by the hunting community. Why, for instance, should bird killing be more attractive than bird watching? Why should the culture of guns in every house prevail over the culture of nature study? Why should the Maltese countryside, what little of it remains, be inaccessible to Maltese citizens, shut up in their own homes?

And, widening the argument just a little bit more, why should law enforcement prove to be so difficult? Why can’t the police earn the respect of those who blatantly break the laws of the land? Why, to put it in a different way but still say the same thing, should the police be starved of the necessary manpower to do their job?

Joining the EU, however, was only the beginning. No EU will save even one bird. The EU did its duty according to its principles and directives and it also called our bluff. It now behoves us all to ensure that what is decided in principle, and what was decided by the majority of the Maltese in two, maybe three, successive votes, is implemented. This is the only way forward. The hunters have no right to make us stop the clock or even put it back.