hooks not fired by a merge's auto-commit

Using git 1.7.1 it seems that a merge (more specifically the
auto-commit) does not fire any of the following hooks:
pre-commit  prepare-commit-msg commit-msg

Is that by design?
Would it be folly to try to patch that behavior?

I humbly request your input before I go trying to "correct" this behavior.

-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.