A derogation unilaterally applied can be unilaterally revoked.

What disgusts me is that the Prime Minister had to virtually wait until the last days of the Spring hunting season to close it, only to save face and look like he has kept his promise.

And Shout took the bait and are happy with the decision. I despair.

Your disgust would be well placed if the hunting community regulated themselves and worked to seriously stamp out the abuse beyond mealy-mouthed platitudes.

But as they won’t and can’t, then they have to be treated like children and someone has to step in and sort it out as the PM did.

Until they can collectively take responsibility, they will have to accept collective punishment.

I’m personally disgusted and find it scary that he should close the season based on his subjective opinion.

These things should be governed by laws and not by a person’s whim.

I’m not for spring hunting, but if it had to be closed, I’d prefer it were by a specific transparent rule, rather than by an angry father who decided to ground the children.

However, in saying this I believe they seem to miss the point entirely. Yes, it is true that in other countries there are those who break the rules without being responsible for the closure of the season for everyone. This is because the people actually trust the enforcement and the citizens to behave.

In Malta it is somewhat different, I believe. There is no way FKNK can claim to speak on behalf of all hunters, for a start. So what if one stands up and says that they are law abiding hunters.

The fact that no one of the hunters has come forward to report the person who killed this bird, and those other birds found dead, suggests that they work together, backing each other up and covering up each other’s tracks. They view themselves as a community, act as a community and then get angry when they are treated as a community.

To top it all off, they have used their political leverage for so many years as one big group of votes to blackmail our politicians with, stalling and halting progress in the country just to get their way.

It is true that it is not fair for everyone to suffer because of a few. The whole population has had to deal with them for so long. It’s about time they realised what it meant to be up against the will of many votes.

Muscat must have thought there would be a landslide victory for the Yes camp. Since they won by such a small number of votes, I believe he has seen that there are more votes to be had from environmentalists than from hunters. Now the hunters are going to have to learn what it means to not have their way all the time.