2 comments so far.CABS bird guard camp ‘Safe Passage’ starts September 10th
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The Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) has announced that they will once again mount operations to monitor illegal hunting and trapping on Malta and Gozo next month. According to their spokesperson Axel Hirschfeld, 24 CABS Bird Guards will be active on the archipelago from the 10th of September onwards to record illegal shooting and trapping of protected bird species and to identify and report poachers to the Maltese Police.
Operation ‘Safe Passage’, involving bird conservationists from Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom, is the seventh successive operation of its kind since 2007. As in previous years CABS will work closely together with the A.L.E. and local NGOs.
Their focus of operations will be the monitoring of important bird migration corridors and roosts using digital cameras and high performance spotting scopes. In addition the teams will check that the afternoon hunting ban imposed by the Maltese Government from the 15th to 30th of September is complied with. Teams in tourist clothing will also locate and report illegal trapping installations for wader and song bird species. Hirschfeld states: "All offences will be rigorously documented and the material turned over to the police for use as evidence in prosecutions".
The Committee said that in response to the cowardly attacks on CABS personnel and vehicles in April and May of this year, the organisation has hired professional security guards for its autumn operations. "We will also equip all our patrol vehicles with video cameras in order to readily identify any persons responsible for criminal vandalism. We hope that this will deter potential attackers and thereby prevent an escalation of violence" comments CABS’ president Heinz Schwarze.
The conservationist emphasised that CABS is only concerned with curbing illegal bird shooting and trapping. "Claims that CABS aims for a total ban on hunting on Malta are absolutely false and only add fuel to the fire" Schwarze states. The CABS teams, as always, welcome contact with all members of the public, above all law-abiding hunters, to talk about their work and discuss bird conservation throughout Europe as a whole.
CABS is an international charitable organisation based in Bonn, Germany. The focus of its work is bird protection and conservation in Europe. In addition to its bird protection camps on Malta it organises and supports similar operations in the Gulf of Naples, Sardinia and Lombardy in Italy, as well as in Bulgaria, France, Spain and on Cyprus.
Being a German organization what prevents CABS from conductiing the same operations in Germany?
That claim to want to turn Malta into a “hunting free zone” so why not do the same in Germany?
Taken from their own website about the hunting sitaution in Germany:
“Hunting is no longer in keeping with the times
Germany’s hunters, some 350,000 in number, interfere massively in the ecological system of the countryside. They transform it to meet their requirements – often to the disadvantage of the natural household. The stocks of desirable species such as Roe and Red Deer and Pheasant are artificially boosted by feeding of wildlife, use of medication or unnatural introductions into the wild. The latter in particular promotes damage to trees in the last remaining near-natural woods and forests. Troublesome competitors such as foxes, martens, badgers, polecats and weasels are however subject to attack from a battery of often inhumane traps, or an open crusade with firearms. The hunting of their carefully protected game is then publicly justified as a necessary measure for keeping wildlife stocks under control – after the natural predators have first been eliminated by the hunters!
Migrant birds such as wild ducks, arctic geese, snipe species and wild pigeons and doves are popular targets for the country’s hunters. Annually some 1.5 million migrants are victims of the German passion for hunting. Hunting of almost tame wildlife – above all wild boar in so-called hunting paddocks – is also popular.
Unlike other EU states, there is a widespread lack of hunting controls in Germany. The maxim here is self-control. In many hunting preserves shooting of raptors, poisoning of ‘predators’ and other offences against hunting and nature protection legislation, is therefore the order of the day.”
Is seems their sole interest is to make their dreams come true at the expense of a vast majority of law abiding hunters. They now employ bodyguards to prevent law abiding citizens from approaching them.
A translation of their organization’s name is the “Commitee Against Bird Slaughter” (CABS). Whether birds can be legally taken or not does not make a difference. Their purpose is to stop hunting at all costs.
What they do in order to achieve their aim makes all their actions dubious to say the least.
I think the gun-owners are living after the slogan: `you are only a right man if you have a gun`. And if they have a gun they want to use it. Of course. But they can`t hunting because there are not other animals to shoot . Also they shoot the birds. It is only a hobby in the minds from this group of persons.
They don`t consider that they slaughter more generations from these animals. Because the birds will not arrive the places where they reproduce themself. More and more birds will leave the earth. But it is wonderfull to see with which acrobatic manouvers they fly across the sky.
The next generation from children they must have luck if they want to see a `king from the sky`.
The bird-shooters don`t have the rights to take away the possibility for the next generation from children to see so many different birds in the sky .
Why the government don`t give these shooters the possibility to shoot from a machine like in Great Britain it calls `Tontaubenschiessen`. If the shooter declares that he will never more to shoot birds he will receive a pass and he can use the machine. If he shoot birds he will leave the pass and he can`t no more use the machine. I think in Malta and Gozo there are enough places to build up these machines but not to the seaside only countyside so the user can clean the places from the bullets.
There are money from the EU if the birds shooting will finish may be. Sorry for my not perfect english.