Mario il-Falkun Malti - drawn for Friends of the Earth Malta, five years ago during Malta's national referendum on whether or not, we should be able to shoot at and kill migratory birds in spring. 

Five years later and nothing has changed. Come spring, the Maltese expect their right to kill birds for sport and their delizju to be protected, even throughout such a crippling pandemic as COVID-19.

I don't expect much from Minister for Hunting Clint Camilleri, but I do expect more from our Minister for the Environment Aaron Farrugia.

Chris Fearne, did the World Health Organization (WHO) know about this before lauding our tackling of the coronavirus pandemic? Did you even know about this? Or was it all done behind your back, while you were desperately trying to get our health care system ready for this fight?

When a whole nation is on tenterhooks and looking to its government for cues, it is dangerous for the government to begin to send mixed messages (look at Italy).

We are told over and over again, that the best way to weather this storm is to stay home, to forgo the life you lead before until it is safe again to resume it. Many have done just that. So why do some expect to be treated differently?

You may answer that as a hobby, hunting is a solitary one, people hunt alone, outdoors, in the countryside. True, and yet with the whole island living in this partial lockdown, where many people are working from home and staying indoors, where many people are forced to make sacrifices, forced not see loved ones, where one of their only reliefs left to them is a solitary walk, cycle, or jog in the very same and limited countryside that, once the hunting season will be opened, will turn into an orgy of gun powder and lead shot.

Even police sources are saying that they lack the resources to keep the hunters in check. The two Peregrin Falcons I saw the other day, gliding over the fields in Fawwara are already surely, shot, stuffed and splayed over someone's mantelpiece.  

Sadder still, the opening of the spring hunting season seems to be simply a political play; as the number of people infected by the coronavirus increases, the government knows stricter lockdown measures will have to be put into place. To ensure they maintain favour with the ever-powerful hunting lobby, they will allow the opening of the spring hunting season, but once a lockdown is enacted nobody will be able to go out, and hopefully not even to hunt.

A win for the government, as they kept their blood promise to the hunters by opening the season. The hunters will have no one else to blame, save the coronavirus for depriving them of their hobby.

The bottom line, whenever it comes to spring hunting, is votes. Votes at the expense of lives, and now not only those of animals, but ours too.

The (now) American comedian John Oliver said it best in his latest episode of Last Week Tonight: 

“What we all choose to do outside of our hospitals, has a direct and significant impact on what happens inside them.”