Af­ter nine months of in­ac­tiv­i­ty, hunters will like­ly be able to re­sume hunt­ing by next week­end, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced dur­ing the COVID-19 press con­fer­ence in To­ba­go on Sat­ur­day.

In the past two weeks, groups of hunters have protest­ed against the Gov­ern­ment’s pre­vi­ous de­ci­sion to sus­pend the hunt­ing sea­son, which typ­i­cal­ly runs from Oc­to­ber to Feb­ru­ary, how­ev­er, they fi­nal­ly have their wish. And, ac­cord­ing to the Pres­i­dent of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Hunters Li­onel Em­manuel, mem­bers are over­joyed.

“This thing is long over­due be­cause it re­al­ly had noth­ing to do with COVID which sup­pos­ed­ly stopped hunters from hunt­ing be­cause the sport of hunt­ing is not a con­gre­gat­ing sport,” Em­manuel said.

Say­ing there are three main types of hunt­ing in T&T, he added that “run­ning dog hunt­ing” has been par­tic­u­lar­ly af­fect­ed. He said this was the case be­cause the dogs have been in­ac­tive for nine months, and they lose mus­cle mass, al­so af­fect­ing their over­all health. But now, he said, they can get back to do­ing what they do best.

How­ev­er, while hunters are ea­ger to re­sume the sport, Em­manuel said they still have to wait on the Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries Clarence Ramb­harat to ad­just the Con­ser­va­tion of Wild Life Act.

Be­cause of the le­gal loop­hole which al­lowed hunters to hunt on pri­vate land de­spite the sea­son re­main­ing closed, the Gov­ern­ment re­moved game from the sec­ond sched­ule list­ing an­i­mals that can be hunt­ed.

“When the hunt­ing sea­son is open, peo­ple would be able to hunt on pri­vate land, but the an­i­mals must be placed on the sec­ond sched­ule of the act. If the an­i­mals are not on the sched­ule, you can’t hunt them yet,” he claimed.

How­ev­er, he ex­pressed con­fi­dence that the min­is­ter would do so soon, giv­en the Prime Min­is­ter’s as­ser­tion that hunt­ing would be al­lowed to re­sume un­til the end of the sea­son in Feb­ru­ary.

“Hope­ful­ly, by Mon­day, this will go to the print­ery to get the an­i­mals back on the sched­ule and put out the le­gal no­tice that he has re­in­stat­ed the an­i­mal on the sched­ule that was delet­ed,” Em­manuel said.

Among the an­i­mals typ­i­cal­ly list­ed on the sched­ule are cay­man, lizards, agouti, ar­madil­lo, deer, quenk and lappe.

Mean­while, just re­cent­ly, there was a small demon­stra­tion against Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh in New York con­cern­ing the cur­rent COVID reg­u­la­tion on the hunt­ing sea­son.

A video of the demon­stra­tion was cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia. Three peo­ple dressed as Trans­former ac­tion fig­ure toy char­ac­ters and an­oth­er in a Min­nie Mouse cos­tume held a ban­ner in what ap­peared to be New York’s down­town Times Square.

The ban­ner bear­ing a huge pic­ture of a point­ing Deyals­ingh stat­ed “Trinidad and To­ba­go: Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is abus­ing his pow­er against hunters. The world is watch­ing.”

In the back­ground were stores like T Mo­bile, Sepho­ra and oth­ers and peo­ple were mov­ing around and gath­ered around lit screens watch­ing oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties.

Deyals­ingh, in To­ba­go for the Prime Min­is­ter’s press con­fer­ence, said he was un­aware of the over­seas demon­stra­tion, but added that “health min­is­ters all over the world are tar­gets, they’re tar­gets for the peo­ples’ frus­tra­tions, so I have noth­ing against any­one. I un­der­stand how they feel. Let the peo­ple ex­press them­selves, I have no prob­lem what­so­ev­er with it, I un­der­stand ful­ly.”