The Federation for Hunting & Conservation – Malta (FKNK), has said in a statement that “whenever Government produced documents to substantiate the criterion of ‘small numbers’ that can be taken from the wild, as required for the application of a derogation from the EU Birds Directive to permit hunting or trapping, it invariably used incorrect or incomplete data to attach to a specifically moulded version of the methodology suggested by the EU Commission itself for this purpose.” This, FKNK said, “leads it to suspect that Government is not willing to allow Maltese Hunters and Trappers achieve that which is rightfully theirs.”

FKNK continued, “the manner and method to be used to arrive at the small numbers, or in the order of 1% mortality figure, is simply explained in the straightforward mathematical formula supplied by the EU Commission in its Guidance Document on hunting under the ‘Birds Directive.’ Even a worked example, regarding the water rail, is illustrated in the said document, where all the known breeding populations of all mainland Europe countries are used in the example’s calculations. The document also explains the formula that is to be used in the case of non-huntable species, such as would be the case if a derogation were to be applied to permit live-finch trapping.”

“On the other hand, both for derogating for spring-hunting and now in its latest unnecessary attempt to apply a derogation for the trapping (live-capture) of legally huntable species, the Maltese Government in the first instance totally ignores FKNK’s expert advice and several scientific documents it supplies, and then proceeds to invent formulas, such as the inverse proportion recipe used for the spring hunting derogation, quotes breeding populations without naming the source of reference, selects breeding populations of countries at will and with no scientific backing, arbitrarily chooses to divide the migrating populations by three or by six, uses incorrect species which do not even migrate over the Maltese Islands in its workings, at times forgets that migrating birds know no countries’ borders and applies only EU countries breeding populations, and refers to bird-ringing records as it pleases, thus finally arriving at its premeditated illogical, impractical and scientifically incorrect figures,” FKNK said.

The statement concluded that “none of these methods form part of the Guidance Document, the Birds Directive or the ruling of the European Court of Justice of the 10th September 2009.”

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