Hunter's 'conversion' is false

Likening his giving up shooting to St Paul's conversion, Carmel Cilia (The Sunday Times, March 21) merely shows his superficial knowledge of both St Paul and the true nature of hunting.

Mr Cilia unknowingly did well not to shoot the mistle thrush he had lured within two metres of himself, because shooting a bird at point-blank range is unacceptable in the hunting code of practice, and also because one should not shoot a sitting target.

His description of the incident is an admission that what made him decide to give up the sport was not logical reasoning but an emotional knee-jerk reaction. The same feelings had overcome another Gozitan ex-'hunter' from New York who "converted" following an incident in which, as a boy of 13, he had illegally shot (he had no gun licence) a swift (a bird protected since 1937).

When Mr Cilia the other day saw "hunters" shooting at swallows in Gozo, as a true nature lover, he should have reported them to the police, even discreetly, for shooting during the closed season and for shooting at protected birds.

Mr Cilia thinks he was born "with the hunting gene programmed in his genome", and yet he "feels remorse when he recalls how many birds he shot". It sounds like a contradiction. Similarly, he again contradicts himself by saying that "today the number of hunters increased so more birds are shot", adding in the next sentence that "there are fewer birds".

He is today a nature lover, enjoys breeding birds in his garden, and likes "sitting on a stone at night watching the moon cast a silver sheen on the rocks". What Mr Cilia needs to understand is that hunters also enjoy doing all these things, but at the same time thoroughly enjoy their passion. Nature lovers are not all hunters, but all true hunters are nature lovers.

Comparing hunting with smoking and gambling, Mr Cilia again shows strange reasoning. Smoking is proved to be bad for health and gambling is bad for the pocket. Yet, hunting invariably provides a sense of enjoyment and keeps hunters in constant contact with nature - a rather huge difference from gambling and smoking.

In the end, this 'ex-hunter', lumping all hunters together, pities them "for they do not know what they're doing". Well, I can assure him that many of us know exactly what we are doing and why we do it. He should, therefore, reserve his pity for those who would remove the hunting gene from the human genome, and who, in confusing reason with emotion, do not know what they are doing.

The only good derived from Mr Cilia's story is that he no longer hunts. Hunters do not want people in their midst who proclaim "If I were still a hunter, I too would have probably caved in and found it difficult to regulate myself".