Anybody with an addiction should be in rehab, not have his behaviour justified and validated

The argument that some men are literally addicted to hunting, and that they suffer from withdrawal symptoms, including major depression that can lead to their hospitalisation, is being used to JUSTIFY a Yes vote in the referendum.

“We have to vote Yes to protect their mental health and save their lives. It’s only Christian and human life is worth more than that of birds.”

This is such skewed reasoning. Anybody with an addiction should be helped to understand that he needs to go to rehab, or see a psychiatrist, not have his behaviour justified as though addictions are perfectly fine because no harm is being caused to the self unlike with addictions to, say, alcohol or drugs or promiscuous sex.

When people have no control over their behaviour, and sink into mental illness if they can’t get their fix, whatever that fix is, they have a serious psychological problem. We are not talking here of deliberately preventing those with a creative drive from expressing their creativity, as a form of punishment with the express purpose of cruelty. That’s in another category altogether.

I have given some thought to this business about addiction to hunting, and the symptoms which hunters describe, and it strikes me that it comes out of much the same psychiatric box as addiction to shopping in women, which is a form of hunting…or rather, gathering.

Women’s psychological problems are more readily recognised as such because there is more willingness to mark down women as ‘crazy’, so shopping addiction is acknowledged as a problem in a way that hunting addiction is not. And this is not because shopping addiction costs money and hunting doesn’t. Hunting costs a fair amount of money, and women tend to have less access to money unless they work, so they satisfy their shopping addiction with trawling the shops day after day, even if they see the same things on the same racks.

There’s another factor at work, I think, too: the compulsion for bargains which, in many Maltese, is a full-blown obsession and is sometimes mistaken for stinginess. When the compulsion reaches its extreme form, it leads to irrational behaviour. For example – the Maltese woman who takes a car out for many miles to the outer reaches of the European metropolis where she lives (in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in that metropolis, where her council overheads are enormous) to buy lavatory paper in bulk from a slashed-price hypermarket.

Maltese people will also take anything that is free even if they have no use for it. If asked to pay even one cent for it, however, they will refuse it. This manifests itself at all levels. Look at the way everybody at the greengrocer’s van accepts the free parsley and lovage (karfus) which are handed out with purchases, even if they never use them.

Majtezwel take them, they clearly reason, once they’re free. You never know, and I can always throw them away. There is absolutely no understanding of why this is wrong: that if they have no use for something they should leave it for somebody else who will have use for it, and if the greengrocer knows that his herbs are being thrown away, then he will direct his time, energy and resources to growing something else that won’t be thrown away.

Birds shot out of the sky and trapped on land are ‘bargains’. They are free of charge. Of course, hunting costs money, especially when you have to travel to do it. But an addiction to bargain-hunting isn’t rational. Some women will spend large amounts of money to travel to the capital cities of Europe during the January sales to hunt for bargains. They don’t factor in the cost of the flights and the hotel, but they do factor in the cost of overweight luggage because that is – perversely – linked directly to the items they have bought and in their minds puts up the cost of those bargains in a way that the flights and hotel do not. So they only buy within their 20/25kg allowance and when the cost of the trip is factored over just those few things, they are much, much more expensive than they were before the sale.

I really do think that the ‘bargain’ compulsion kicks in with bird-shooting at some subconscious level, which is why men who shoot go wild at the sight of a lot of birds or of exceptional birds in the same way that women go wild when let in through the doors at the Harrods sale after a night of queuing.

If there are any psychologists reading this, I’d be fascinated to know what they think.