Submitted by ANIMAL RIGHTS MALTA’S BLOG

Mark Mifsud Bonnici, secretary of the “St Hubertus” hunters, writes a letter in today’s The Sunday Times (entitled “Hunting as it should be”) in which he both seeks to defend the practice of legal hunting by correctly claiming that the meat bought from supermarkets is also the product of killed animals, and also to condemn illegal hunting, for, in his own words: “The few irresponsible hunters must be reined in, if for no other reason, not to be used by unscrupulous anti-hunters to tarnish Malta’s international reputation”.

I will of course not waste much space arguing that it is our democratic freedom of the press that allows anyone to report on any illegality - illegal hunting being no exception - and that there is nothing to be scrupulous about when reporting on facts.

Mr Mifsud Bonnici writes:

“In the past, hunting was the prime source of food for mankind, and all men were hunters. Development has brought about a change in this instinctive practice. City dwellers who obtain their food from supermarkets have lost their primeval instinct and unknowingly ignore the fact that all meat is not born in plastic bags, but reared, fattened and slaughtered in abattoirs.

These people, far removed from the unpleasant realities of life and conditioned by the fictional trappings of modernity, are usually the first to condemn hunting as a barbaric, obsolete practice.

Hunting has now evolved into a regulated form of relaxation and recreation enjoyed by many people worldwide. It also provides the hunter with a source of healthy food. In fact the benefits of eating game (sic) are steadily being promoted as part of a healthy diet”.

Mr Mifsud Bonnici then veers his letter in the direction alluded to above, which, for reasons I will explain shortly, does not necessitate reproduction on this blog.

Mr Mifsud Bonnici echoes my thoughts in the first paragraph, although I draw a totally different conclusion.

I have personally always maintained that perhaps subsistence hunting (hunting for food) might actually be less cruel than buying meat from supermarkets, the meat usually coming from animals who are confined in small unnatural spaces for their whole lives before actually being killed. In fact, on January 27, I wrote: “In terms of suffering for the animals concerned, most probably a ‘clean’ shot from a hunter causes less suffering than a life in a modern ‘farm’ and the actual execution of the non-human animals to obtain their skin and flesh or other ‘products’. Humane slaughter is a myth”.

That said, considering that veganism is an option, this does not exonerate hunting. One should not accept an unnecessary “lesser evil” just because opting for the “greater evil” would be worse.

As I wrote on January 27, “hunting most probably was a necessity to our ancestors, both as a means of defence from predators, and as a means of sustenance and clothing. However…we do not need to kill any animals for clothing and food (anymore). Humans can live a perfectly healthy life on a vegan diet, and similarly, the skin of non-human animals is not necessary to clothe humans, particularly when there are sufficient clothing options available that are not made of dead animal skins”.

It must also be pointed out, that hunters in Malta are not subsistence hunters, and all of them buy meat from supermarkets.

As for the rest of the letter, I will spare you my own commentary, since it does not concern abolitionist animal rights activists (please note that neither BirdLife nor Proact are animal rights (AR) organizations - animal rights organizations oppose all kinds of animal killing, including that the product of which ends up in what Mr Mifsud Bonnici correctly describes as ending up in plastic bags in supermarkets).

It is also worth mentioning at this point that not only has there never been an animal rights activist in the Ornis Committee criticized by Mr Mifsud Bonnici in his letter (the committee was set up to study and give recommendations to the government on hunting regulations), but there actually can never be one, for the simple reason that an animal rights activist would by definition stick to his uncompromising conviction that no animal should be unnecessarily killed, be the animal a member of a numerous species, protected species, or otherwise.

It is perhaps also worth stressing that an animal rights activist would not bother with numbers (fabricated or true), since to animal rights activists, every animal matters.

That said, animal rights activists, being members of a democracy, concede that democracies function through majority rule. This essentially means that education is the only key to a gradual elimination of all animal abuse, while legislation is the means by which the regulations against abuse recognized to be such by the non-AR majority are to be enforced.

AR activists are also intelligent enough to recognize that now that we have become members of the EU through a majority vote, we have willingly handed over some of our “sovereignty” to the EU. This, in effect, means that Malta must abide to EU regulations, for better or for worse. The spring hunting issue is no exception.

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