A beacon of hope
Cartoon commissioned by Friends of the Earth Malta
Vote No
I am not trying to stop hunting. Nor do I want to stop hunting. Our nature dictates we must hunt. Nature hunts –it hunts for a reason. Humans hunt. They hunted great big fucking woolly mammoths, legendary Moby-Dicks, we hunted each other’s civilisation – we hunted out of necessity, we hunted to survive. We got good at it. Food, clothing, tools, medicine, paint, etc. – We harvested every part of what we hunted. Survival made us efficient. We got really good at it. We dominated every specimen, proclaiming the earth ours by divine right. Hunting anything and everything that came our way. It’s us against them. We extinguish giants without batting an eye. We hunt indiscriminately and wastefully. We sit atop our thrones of steel usurping the lands from the Nature we enslaved. Ships full of shark fins for fine dining, snake-oil salesmen selling rhino horn for ailments, white tigers shot for fashionable whims - you get the gist - a systematic extermination of everything and anything for our individual pleasure - Fuck me if we haven’t all but raped the world into submission. In a twisted way it’s understandable - Nature is as beautiful as it is a bitch, giving as easily as it takes; it plays by the laws of the universe – to which all life must stand accountable – a community of sorts. When one rises against their own community with perceived absolute power – a dictatorship, and we all know they never end well. Evolution should have given us the insight to harness and live in harmony with Nature; instead it allowed us to wage holy-war on it. Humans are hunters. Nobody can argue with that. What we also can’t argue with is that from the smartest species we have become the stupidest. And this referendum reflects just that – human stupidity. The argument is simple – stop hunting during a specific period when bird populations are migrating to breed. Short-sighted, the hunting lobby can’t see that by stopping spring hunting they will have more to shoot at in autumn. Man is intrinsically selfish and blind to the bigger picture. Personally I detest the harming of life, yet on a basic level I understand it – I will swat a mosquito trying to bite me, as I will eat a goat curry plated in front of me, but I have no interest in killing for “sport”. Hunting is a tradition of survival, but what is practiced today has lost all those values, leaving something that one can only call BLOODSPORT. The discourse surrounding April 11th’s referendum is bigger than most care to understand. It isn’t about saving the birds (a lot of which will still be shot down outside European borders), nor is it about people’s hobbies, or their right to bear arms - it is about the kind of society we hope to be, and strive to become. Voting No does not ban hunting; it raises the awareness to a problem that needs addressing, if you want hunting to survive then it needs informed regulation – this is the only way to truly safeguard the rights of law-abiding hunters and in turn conserve our environment. For have no doubt that voting yes or abstaining will only condemn both hunting and our environment, dashing any hope of bettering our society. Vote No on the 11th of April, don’t vote for the birds, don’t vote for the politicians, don’t even vote for yourself – Vote No for hope.