The plant-eating dinosaurs (herbivores) have been extinct for a long time. According to recent findings, it is believed that their demise was caused by the lack of food in the wake of a global climate catastrophe.

The flesh-eating dinosaurs (the carnivores) also became extinct when their prey, the herbivores, died out.

Some small herbivores that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs did survive and their descendants are still with us.

The survival of these small mammals is attributed to the fact that, being smaller in size, they did not require the enormous amounts of food that sustained the dinosaurs, and the scant supply of vegetable matter that was then available sufficed to keep them alive, while the dinosaurs, with their bigger appetite, simply starved to death.

The above should be an object lesson to Maltese game shooters. What makes sense, to be content with small bags and still enjoy your hunting, or have big bags and then have to give up your sport?

In a perfect world our sportsmen should voluntarily ration themselves to a limited bag and, like the Jurassic small mammals, survive to hunt another day.

One cannot imagine Maltese game shooters doing that, so they must be forced to limit their bag for their own good.

The present government has tried, and failed miserably. The compilation of the total number of birds bagged in the last hunting season was a fiasco.

What the government must do before the next shooting season is to limit the firepower of game shooters by enacting a law that would permit only two cartridges to be loaded at one time. For the uninformed, as things now stand, automatic shotguns can be legally loaded with three shells in all, but this regulation is generally flouted, and such guns are loaded to their full capacity of five shots.

To ensure that only two shots are loaded at a time, the magazine capacity of automatics must be permanently reduced. By taking such a step the authorities will be doing shooters a favour, and one expects the collaboration of the shooters’ associations if they have the interests of their members at heart, as well as the survival of game shooting.

If nothing is done about the matter, which will probably be the case, we the Maltese shooters, will follow Tyrannosaurus Rex down extinction lane.

It will come to pass.

Watch this space.

Joseph Vella

SLIEMA