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.

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.

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.]

If anything it’s a ‘vizzju’ not a ‘delizzju’ – and defamation be damned .

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.

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.

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.]

Hunting for rabbits at night is also illegal.

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.