Labour and its progressive love for animals
There’s a discussion going on beneath another post about the not-so-private lives of Maltese politicians, and somebody has just posted this comment:
I was young but I remember perfectly getting the fright of my life coming face to face with one of these bulls as I left the bathroom at the Paola Youth Centre. The bull was pulled by its horns into the Youth Centre where a bottle or two of whisky were forced down its throat. White foam frothed round its mouth. Sometime later this bull collapsed in the middle of Paola Square.
That would have been in the 1971 general election. In 1981, which I remember clearly because I had just turned 17, it was dead rabbits all the way. The sorts of men who I remember driving up our street on lorries with bulls this time did so while skinning rabbits right there on the back of the lorry and flinging them at the shuttered-up house of the tal-pepe and the puliti who Mintoff had taught them to despise.
When I left the house against my parents’ wishes to pop round the corner, there was a right and proper melee on Tower Road: a stream of cars with bloodied rabbits tied to the bumper bouncing along the road, dead rabbits pinned to sticks and waved around and rabbit skins littering the promenade.
As far as I know, nobody ever felt the urge to descend on Bormla in convoys to rub the residents’ noses in it when the PN won a general election, but Labour won, they would flock to Sliema to yell insults at those who lived there, while all the houses stayed locked with curtains drawn. Not last time, though – last time, Sliema joined in, because development has changed the profile of the town and also because lots of old-time Sliema residents suddenly had a brainstorm and decided it was super-smart to vote for a sleazy toad with half a million in cash in the house and a long list of Malta’s worst criminals as his clients.
I think that this business of discussing public cruelty to bulls and public savagery with rabbits is quite ironic a day after this government announced its creation of a new role: Commissioner for Animals. How they’ve evolved, God bless them.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20141108/local/animal-welfare-commissioner-appointed.543119
Did he spend his years at the police Forensic branch during the golden years of Labour frame-ups? Just saying…
Savages. I’m speechless.
You’ve made me realise that they were live bulls you are talking about. I had somehow assumed they were papier-mâché models.
[Daphne – You have got to be joking. Of course they were live bulls. Are they likely to have bothered fashioning some out of paper and glue when they had real ones? The rabbits in 1981 were real, too. You should have seen the blood and guts.]
I remember the rabbits in 1981 very clearly and the many houses that were targeted.
Daphne I think you need to spell out why rabbits were the animal of choice then. We who lived through the times remember them only too well. We had several rabbits strung to our door by those damn thugs
The younger generations who might not know any of our recent history, or foreigners who have since made malta their own, might not connect the dots.
Exactly AE . I remember a particularly gory scene of a rabbit being skinned alive on one of those trucks ; the horrific scene of the agony of that poor creature , its squeals mixing with the raucous laughter of the thugs shouting ” Ha jiehu l-fenek !”(referring to Eddie Fenech Adami) – ” Hekk naghmlulu !” – still haunts and sickens me to this day .
Yes we all remember TVM:
RUN RABBIT RUN RUN RUN
Democracy at its finest.
Run rabbit run played continuously on Xandir Malta by DJ Clive Waters now Malta’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I don’t remember 1971, but I have clear memories of a meeting Dom Mintoff held in Birkirkara just before the 1987 election, near the primary school, just a few blocks away from Fenech Adami’s residence. The school fence was full of impaled dead rabbits.
No one spoke about animal rights back then, maybe because even human rights were far behind.
They also fried rabbits in the 1996 general election celebrations, at least in the Mosta and Naxxar Labour Party clubs. And this time nothing of the sort happened as they had no animal signifying Gonzi in some way or other available to butcher.
In 1981 around 6am I remember waiting near the Rialto in Cospicua cheering and applauding the trucks with dead rabbits tied to the bumper.
One of the truck drivers knew my mother and invited us to join them. We spent the whole day driving through the streets of Malta to return around 5 o’clock. Although I was a child, I knew why they had rabbits there and for us this was very normal.
Now thinking about it, I feel disgusted.
Researcher says:
See front page of L-Orizzont 14th or 15th June 1971
Give us a scan of L-Orizzont 14th or 15th June 1971, please.
I wonder if the little matter of the illegal zoo is on his list, or maybe not?