Spring hunting: the experience of a farmer in Gozo
A woman who farms with her family in Gozo rang me in the thick of the spring hunting debate to point out how nobody – not the politicians and not the media – ever mentions how badly spring hunting affects those who must work their fields with shooting going on all around, and who must protect those fields from rampaging shooters.
I asked her to write it down and send it in for upload, and here it is, below.
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This has been one of the worst spring hunting seasons for us.
That is, our family has gone to work with even more guns to our heads, with hunters trespassing our fields at all times often coming face to face with them armed with their guns and if you say something you can bet our cars are scratched, crops damaged, fences broken, our cats shot and they will be there before you the next day and the next.
They shoot over our heads across fields even from busy streets, suddenly from behind walls and we have to dive for cover and believe it or not some have the cheek to build hides on our land too.
So what if the guy is in his own field, is it right that he can shoot while we are working in the next field? Or he tells you that you had better go home and come back to your field another day?
We watch them shoot and bring down much, much more than they are allowed and they brag (and lie) about this to each other. What upsets us most however is the young boys who are out hunting when they should be at school (yes!) sometimes alone, without daddy or uncle.
We are forever picking up spent cartridges, Twistees and wafer wrappers and find they have plundered the whole fruit harvest while trapping in the hides with clear evidence left behind.
Report them? Of course not. We don’t trust the police, because we know some of them are hunters and trappers themselves or relatives or friends of the hunters.
Our members of parliament and MEPs don’t help either, but then we collected signatures against spring hunting from members of the hunters’ families too.
And those people who claim they are not hunters but think that everyone has a right to his hobby are putting our life in danger. How would they feel along with our Prime Minister and the Minister for Animal Rights if they had to go to work with gun-toting idiots all over the place?
They should realise and care that these hunters are hijacking agricultural land, showering us with lead (forget organic farming) and ruining our tourist industry as well.
We meet a lot of tourists who enjoy our countryside and who have been chased by these sweet and intelligent (they claim to have professionals too among them) hunters too, same like Chris Packham was.
The bird-hunting season is over for now but these same people will be out hunting rabbits, damaging our water pipes with pellets and trampling even more in our fields because rabbits are on the ground and not in the air. Surely these people who ‘need to hunt’ aren’t also in the poverty line, as it is claimed we have quite a few of them in Malta by our present government and President?
Our islands are just too small for anyone to hunt. There is just no comparison and rights of what they can do abroad in their big countries and why we cannot be allowed to do the same here.
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The irony is that Labour increased votes in Gozo from the hunters lobby and was about to elect an MEP – Clint Camilleri.
David, can you enlighten me on how you come to the conclusion that the increased Labour votes are from the hunters lobby?
You and people like you use arguments which are so false, that you think that by repeating and repeating and repeating them they will become true.
Very well said; we support you 100%. What you said has been my main argument all the way, namely that Malta is too small to afford any hunting without annoying people.
Hence we should have a 100% ban on any hunting and the hunters can practise their “hobby” in clubs for clay-pigeon shooting.
There is just about nothing to add to this post. The lady has brought forward all the good points against hunting INCLUDING the blatant lies surrounding this barbarism.
Unfortunately for her and the rest of us who agree with her, the hunting lobby is a well-organized machine who has the ear of politicians on both sides of the divide.
Unfortunately too, politicians from both sides of the divide care more about being re-elected than about declaring wrong what is.
I am delighted to read this article, for no other reason than it gives a voice to a Maltese national speaking out against the extent of hunting on these tiny islands.
This whole country is half the size the town I left to come and live in Malta (obviously I am not comfortable criticising anything when I have only lived here for two years) but the whole country appears held in captivity with these hunters.
There is NO BIRDSONG in the air. I cannot believe how that is acceptable?
As a nation you are distressed at the obesity levels, but no wonder, because no family can take to the countryside for recreation as there are people with shotguns everywhere.
Just because it is ‘tradition’ does not make it right, and unfortunately for Malta, which I love, you are on this occasion completely out of step with every other nation on the planet.
This is not going to go away, and unfortunately I see a future where campaigns will start to boycott Malta.
This is how seriously it is seen abroad. As for the new politicians, again as an outsider, I see a government jumping on the modern bandwagon, embracing all sorts of advanced thinking legislation like ivil unions etc (all to be commended) so this hunting barbarism, and it is barbarism, is so out of kilter, it almost doesn’t make sense.
No ‘young’ modern-thinking leader of a political party can view these hunters as anything other than an anachronistic barbarism. So what has happened? This Maltese government can have no credibly on the world stage.
Justify yourself to your European counterparts, and international counterparts, because if you wish for credibility then you must act.
That’s Gozo for you.
I can strongly confirm the situation in Gozo as described in this piece – especially the police bit. I have also repeatedly come across identical and sometimes worse situations in the main island, where the aggression of hunters caught breaking the law, harassing and trespassing is much more dangerous than that encounterd in Gozo.
It is a regular occurrence to encounter gangs of young boys, not much older than 12, wielding shotguns they could hardly carry followed by even younger boys. It will not be long before a tragedy occurs – perhaps then we’ll open our eyes.
You mean the writer or the hunters?
This should be turned into a full-page ad and placed in all our newspapers in English and Maltese and paid for by the Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries & Animal Rights. It’s surely an eye-opener.
What’s happening in Gozo is surely happening in Malta but farmers are scared of being targeted. What a country!
The woman who wrote this letter should be proud that now, there are 3 PL members of parliament to protect her. Will she be bold enough to forward the letter to them all?
I was one of the first persons to move to Victoria Gardens in Ta’ l-Ibrag and it was quite dangerous during the hunting season since stone masons would abandon their work, produce a shotgun, and fire at any bird that dared to approach.
Bird-trappers would appear from behind rubble walls, guns pointing at us, telling us not to disturb them even though we were walking through well-indicated oublic country walks.
Before Ta’ l-Ibrag we lived in Santa Lucia in its early days and quite often we were woken up with spent lead pellets showering our bedroom windows.
As a headteacher in Zabbar I had an employee who invariably went on sick leave when the hunting season started.
Malta is too small to accommodate “sport” that endangers life and seriously inconveniences non-participants.
Unfortunately, as long as politicans worry more about vote-catching or losing votes, hunting is here to stay.
If people go on being afraid of hunters for one reason or another, they will ultimately be squashed and goodbye citizen’s rights, etc.
Poor Malta, I certainly do not envy the future generations unless there are some that have enough determination to do what is really right irrespective of the consequences.
It takes only a few such persons and once there is a leader others will certainly follow. However, I suppose I am dreaming that this will ever materialise.
At least this Gozitan woman is not blaming the Maltese hunters who go to Gozo for a few days for hunting.
Funnily we have never heard these complaints from Maltese farmers. Who knows maybe the Gozitan farmers are against having persons around the fields. It’s not only grown in roundabouts over there.
[Daphne – How ridiculous can you be, Mr Loporto. I live among fields and farmers and can tell you for a fact that it’s a massive problem. Those who hunt rabbits are far worse as this woman has pointed out, because they operate at night and under cover of darkness, using a torch, they strip crops when no rabbits show up.]
Mr. Loporto, are you serious? Do you seriously not see the point that the farm-woman is making?
It seems that you are accepting what this farmer said as gospel truth.
[Daphne – Yes. Aside from having spoken to her, since the age of 26 I have lived in a situation where I can observe the same thing happening around me, and much worse than that too over the years, including illegal hunting of rabbit by torchlight at night with Landrovers driving over fields beneath our house and destroying crops in the process, illegal devices used to replicate bird-mating calls left to play on a loop right through the night, night after night, with the police ignoring our reports until we found ourselves having to track down and destroy those devices ourselves to be able to get to sleep (at that sleep-deprived point, even the birds had stopped being an issue), birds of prey flying together dropping out of the sky in a volley of shots even as we admired them, a dead, shot eagle beneath my laundry line where the man who shot it thought better of risking climbing in to get it, the bloodied corpses of robins routinely being the first markers of Advent, my scalp scorched by falling gun-shot while working in the garden, men with guns standing just over the garden wall because our Japanese medlar tree, laden with fruit and visible beyond the wall, is a magnet for golden orioles, a man with a gun following a hoopoe to our gate and standing there with his gun while the hoopoe was in the garden, streams of gun-toting men using (now the late) Cikku Fenech’s right of passage alongside our garden perimeter because he had told them they could, the owner of fields visible from our house asking me whether I’d seen anything untoward because his ENTIRE crop of globe artichokes had been cut and stolen during the night and the last people he had seen there, when they shouldn’t have been, were shooters. The EU-mandated restrictions on hunting, along with better policing and more public awareness of this anti-social behaviour, has really improved matters a great deal. So the natural conclusion is that getting rid of this menace altogether will make life even better for birds and for people who don’t shoot them.]
I do not deny that you might find one or two hunters who might trespass but it is surely not the norm.
Try going out for a walk in the country and see whether is is something easy to step in someone’s fields. Most tourists can confirm this. You are sure to be met by some rudeness, that might surprise you.
[Daphne – Farmers do not spend the day in their fields, Mr Loporto. They have generally left them by 9am and will only return again late in the day if at all. Walking round the fields in the area where I live, you will almost never see anybody in them.]
The Gozitan farmer should also be asked as from whom do hunters rent land to hunt in, the same land for which they pay a pittance to the original owner, while they rent it out to hunters for quite substantial sums.
The anti-hunting group seem to be widening their line of attack, and trying to gain support especially after the great surprise. I mean the over 100000 who don’t seem to share their views.
[Daphne – You are really wrong about those 100,000. The petition they signed had nothing to do with bird-shooting and trapping. They signed a petition about minority rights, which I would have probably signed too.]
Mr.Loporto has a personality problem that needs seeing to if he takes an obscene pleasure denying proven facts for the satisfaction of irritating people who are under no illusions about the truth. If he needs help I can forward to him a few contact numbers of some good shrinks.
I had these problems in my field. They used to trample on my onion seed-beds and in my potato field, shoot at the room where I store my tools, shoot at birds in trees, damaging and killing the trees in the process, eating fresh broad beans and chickpeas and demolishing drystone walls to get easier access from neighbouriing fields into mine.
Fight fire with fire.
I started stretching lengths of steel wires six inches above the edges to trap trespassers. Then I hang lots of cans on the wires which rattle and frighten off the birds as soon as they are hit or shot at.
When the hunters were away I used to demolish their hideouts and pierce their roofs.
From time to time, I changed my traps.
At times I used to go on high ground to observe who was entering in my field and from which side and acted accordingly.
This farmer forgot to mention the hunting dogs which do a lot of damage also.
Hunting for rabbits at night is also illegal.
I am sick and tired of all the talk of protecting hobbies. If such a hobby is an infringement of the rights of others, how can it be justified.
It seems to me that the latter far outweigh any claim that hunters may have that theirs is a right.
Firstly the practice of a hobby is not a right but if it doesn’t hurt or bother anyone, nobody is going to care. But hunting does hurt and bother others. What about those who love to listen to birds sing and see them fly?
Or those who want to go for walks in the countryside without having to face off people toting guns?
What about citizen’s rights to the use of their land without fear.
I remember one time my grandmother was having a walk in our garden and she got hit by pellets. What about this woman’s right to the privacy of her land without trespassers or the right to earn a living off the fruits of her lands which are getting damaged by the lead from pellets.
Or consumers not being able to buy local organic vegetables because of that lead. I could go on and on.
It’s the intellectuals’ fault, and the politicians’ too.
Let me explain.
The operative keyword in the whole bird-shooting and trapping debate has always been that “deliiiizju”. And that, my friends, is why no one will ever do anything to rid us of the hunting lobby. Because in Maltese, that words carries a sacrality about it that transcends rational discourse and “policy”.
I remember Gunther Verheugen, bless him, on Xarabank, assaulted by a scrum of bird-shooters, staring open-mouthed. This Mitteleuropean, like any normal European, could not understand how the “hunters” in Malta define themselves as “hunters”, and he asked them as much. “You are not hunter by profession, ja? You are also father, und worker, und employee, und maybe self-employed, und you are citizen in other activities besides hunting, ja. Und you do not hunt for a living.”
It was all foreignese to them. They couldn’t understand. And neither could the better-intentioned politicians.
It’s time we cleaned up Maltese vocab. It’s destroying our ability to think, if it ever existed in the first place.
Bird-shooting, just like gun ownership in the United States, is not a “delizzju”, a hobby. It’s a human activity. It’s a a human activity that you do at someone else’s expense, i.e. at the expense of the rest of us who do not shoot or trap birds, and at the expense of all of us who live on this tiny rock we call our homeland.
Ganutell is a delizzju. Stamp-collecting is a delizzju. Scale modelling is a delizzju. And a fine one too, judging by the annual exhibition. Cycling is a delizzju.
But shooting and trapping, just like fireworks, are not delizzji. They are lobbies. You could call them a corporations, just the NRA is a corporation. After all, there is big money involved, and many have become rich making money off these “delizzji”. Let’s stop at “lobby”, lest some gun-toting nutter take me to court for defamation.
Let’s cut the sentimental bullshit.
If anything it’s a ‘vizzju’ not a ‘delizzju’ – and defamation be damned .
Daphne experienced rural life. I experienced the sea. We seem to come up with the same conclusions. No landlubber nor any city boy really knows what it is like to be living in either of the realms.
A very eloquent farmer I must say. Perhaps she should run for politics.
Just out of interest we are prepared to pass on any of the reports she failed to lodge with the police ourselves because we have ever reason to doubt the veracity of this letter though we acknowledge its intended purpose perfectly.
Kaccaturi San Ubertu.
[Daphne – I take serious exception to your suggestion that the ‘letter’ is false, Mark, because it is libellous in my regard. Aside from the fact that it is not a letter but a comment sent in to this website at my specific request, I know the identity of the individual, and have spoken to her. It was she who approached me to ask that I give some exposure to what farmers have to endure during the hunting season, because this factor is ignored by the media and in all discussions on the subject of hunting. I asked her to put it in her own words rather than have me report on the subject. It was written by a member of her family who has a university education – and if you think such things unusual or exceptional, or hard to believe, I have to tell you that I most certainly don’t. I live in a farming hamlet, as you know, and can report to you that almost all the girls I saw growing up here over the last 23 years have done remarkably well for themselves in tertiary education. To give you but one example, the daughter of an illiterate chicken-farmer who can’t speak a word of English has a high-flying job with a media communications company in London, working in fluent English.]
The pity is that the parliamentary secretary responsible for agriculture is all for hunting in spring.
So is the parliamentary secretary responsible for MEPA, who is a hunter himself.
Unfortunately the farmers do not form part of a minority, and it seems there are no votes to gather. Hunting birds in spring is more important than agriculture.