Count yourself among the civilized. Vote No.

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 9 April 2015, 08:13 Last update: about 12 years ago

The arguments for and against shooting and trapping birds in the spring have, over the last few weeks, taken the occasional odd turn. But the central point remains: if you consider yourself civilised, you will be voting No.

To the civilised, there has never been any question about it, no need to get locked into any debates or weigh up the pros and cons. There are no pros to killing wild birds during the spring migratory and breeding season (or at any other time, but let’s stick with the subject of the referendum) and the cons are so great that you have to wonder why it is being discussed at all.

I suppose there was a time, perhaps not a hundred years ago, when the mighty and the good discussed the pros and cons of sending children, as young as four, down mines and up chimneys, and they thought the discussion was valid, too. There’s no need to go back that far. Until 1993, Maltese women lost many of their rights and almost all their autonomy on marriage. When they married, what used to be their rights and autonomy were vested in their husband instead. The status quo was taken for granted rather than challenged as the ongoing scandal that it was. When the law was changed to put both spouses on an equal footing, some women actually wondered out loud why equality they never asked for had been foisted upon them.

Now we look back and wonder how any Maltese woman who married before 1993 could bring herself to do so, knowing that she was willingly reducing herself to the status of a legal minor except for her right to vote. It’s because Maltese society was largely unevolved even that recently. You look at women in their 20s and 30s today and you just know for a fact that not only would they not marry under those legal conditions, but they would be raising hell about it after laughing at the merest suggestion that they would sign their autonomy away to their husband: “What? You must be joking. Come on, that can’t be true.” Ah, but it was.

If the No vote wins the day on Saturday, one day soon we will look back with similar astonishment at the way, when the spring migratory season began, we accepted a situation in which thousands of men with guns tramped through the fields and scant copses, blasting whatever they could out of the sky and then lying about it in mandatory text messages to the authorities. “You mean people actually shot birds when they were migrating to breed? What? You must be joking. Come on, that can’t be true.” Ah, but it is.

The most recent polls indicate that the rather sizeable percentage of those who are undecided as to how they will vote (17%), are in their majority women. I imagine that many of these will be the wives of hunters, torn between the No campaign’s arguments which make sense to them and loyalty to their husband. Perhaps loyalty is the wrong word: I would think that those wives are dreading the drama and the household hell if spring hunting is banned. Going by what the hunters say about depression, kalmanti, and feeling that they are going mad if they can’t shoot birds, I can’t say I blame those wives. But they should know that the proper solution is for their husband to get help. As for the hunters themselves, they certainly are not helping their cause by talking as though they are alcoholics facing a vote on Prohibition.

There is nothing remotely civilised about aiming your gun at a bird in flight and taking a sadistic pleasure in blasting it out of the sky, ending its life and destroying a spectacular piece of evolutionary engineering. Civilised people derive pleasure in watching birds soar, and if they are the sort who think about things, they will be amazed each time anew at the wonder that is a migratory bird, with aerodynamics and inbuilt flight-path reading that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years only to be destroyed in Malta by some man who has never been sensitised to the beauty of creation, except perhaps where certain types of women are concerned.

When hunters see birds, they do not see something wondrous that has evolved to beauty and fit-for-purpose perfection, a miracle of life and nature. They see a moving target, an object, something that might as well have been made in a factory. In this, I give them the benefit of the doubt. The thought that they might see migratory birds as the amazing creatures that they are and still desire to destroy them, because it is the destruction of beauty and life that gives them pleasure, is a thought rather too awful to consider.