It’s funny what your mind chooses to remember. I think I must have been 14 or 15 years old when an acquaintance asked me over to his house. We went in through a small hallway so characteristic of Maltese houses and he left me in one of those rooms usually only reserved for the local priest to give his yearly blessing.
I remember sitting on a deep red, velvet armchair not built for comfort and covered in that thick, unyielding plastic that squeaks in protest whenever you sit on it. It was summer and I was wearing a short skirt, the plastic was sticking to my thighs and I was leaving sweat marks everywhere. The air was stuffy and stale, full of a hazy mist of what felt like saudade.
My host, being unused to accommodating anyone, didn’t even trouble himself to put on the light, and because I felt like I was in a church, I didn’t want to touch anything. I sat in squeaky discomfort waiting for him and feeling oddly watched. It was only when he finally came in after what seemed like an age and flicked on the lights that I realised the source of how unsettled I felt. I had been sitting in a mausoleum.
From high shelves and glass cases in the corners of the room, dozens of glass eyes peered at me. Birds with wings spanning walls, a giant flamingo, an eagle. I looked in fascinated horror at birds of all shapes and sizes that I had only ever seen in books or at the Natural History Museum. It felt like I was in some Hitchcock film and I desperately wanted to escape from that sea of accusing eyes. I couldn’t deal with the sheer amount of morbid, dead beauty, nor could I get over the look of pride on my acquaintance’s face. I never spoke to him again.
I’ve never really understood the concept of hunting: the joy of killing or entrapping a living thing that has been going about its harmless business, and yet, I have spoken to a number of men who could write sonnets about it. They speak of the thrill of the chase, the great hunt and the skill needed to finally catch your prey as if it were a battle of wits or some spectacular game of chess; yet truly, nothing could be further from the truth. I think it was comedian Ricky Gervais who said it best when he said: “Sport is fair. If hunting was a sport then the animal would have a gun too.”
Last week yet another flamingo was shot to death while flying across a field. The photos are horrifying and enough to give you nightmares. Lying twisted and covered in its own blood and wasted potential, you truly do wonder how thin the veneer of civilisation sits on some people and what they would do to the neighbour who had wronged them (the newspapers will provide you with all the references you require).
I suppose it’s little wonder that the reporting of a woman being pelted with eggs got such a lukewarm reception from so many in the stead of what should have been unbridled outrage. Four billion years of evolution and yet here we are.
Like everything else in life, it’s hard to talk sense into people when they’re leaving from a completely different perspective than you; it’s even harder to talk someone out of something they are passionate about. It does, however, make you wonder what these people have been through in their lives to think that harming a beautiful, defenceless creature for no reason except sport is a wonderful way to spend a sunny afternoon.
I have constantly looked for ways to dialogue or at least to understand, yet at every turn I realise that it is going to take generation upon generation of change for us to get anywhere, and to be honest, by the time we could have got it together, global warming will have done its bit and wiped us all out. Only then maybe can the world start to recuperate and regenerate.
Who knows, maybe in 200 years’ time, our bones will also be put behind glass cases in dusty rooms. What a lovely piece of poetic justice that would be.