October 1st: “The UK is facing what campaigners describe as an epidemic of gun violence, with over 50 million victims involved annually. Individuals who step in to disrupt or expose the violence risk prosecution under legislation on aggravated trespass. This legal framework, campaigners argue, is designed less to protect public safety than to maintain the conditions under which the system thrives.
According to campaign groups, at the centre of this gun violence are victims who are trafficked across national borders and held captive in circumstances where their brutalisation is normalised. The cruelty they suffer is largely hidden from public view, but behind the epidemic lies a lucrative economy. Vast sums circulate, consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. Critics argue that this financial structure prioritises the protection of profit over life.
A growing wave of lobbying at fairs and exhibitions is fueling the expansion of this violence. Organisers normalise their activities at high-profile events, courting policymakers and promoting products under the banner of tradition and heritage. Behind the displays and networking events lies a coordinated effort to shape the law and secure political backing for the violence to continue.
The violence has reached right across the UK. For campaigners, a practice celebrated in some quarters is, in reality, a vast system of violence, cruelty, and exploitation. Until it is reformed, they warn, 50 million victims a year will continue to suffer and die while the profits roll in.”
The headline you won’t read anywhere else…
The above paragraphs are the headlines you probably won’t see anywhere else, but every word is true.
October 1st marks the start of the pheasant killing ‘season’. It arrives without the nonsense that accompanies the ‘Inglorious 12th’ and the mainstream media don’t take much notice, but over the next four months around 50 MILLION pheasants will become live targets for shooters across the UK. It is the start of a ‘season’ of gun violence and bloodshed.
Pheasants are non-native birds. They are here solely because they are bred in huge numbers to be shot. The birds we are seeing now will largely have been raised on factory farms, where they are held in tiny, wire-mesh cages for months (some Red-legged Partridges will be caged for two years – half their ‘natural’ lives – before being sold to shoots). On some farms, birds will routinely have their beaks mutilated and fitted with ‘bits’ to stop them tearing at each other in the unnatural conditions they are being held.
Those who haven’t succumbed to stress, exhaustion, or disease, many having spent their entire lives in captivity, unable to touch the ground or fly or dust or behave naturally, are trucked across the country and dumped into release pens. From today they will be chased by dogs towards a line of ‘sportsmen’ who try to kill them. Any that survive are driven back towards the guns over and over again…
This appalling violence is sold at fairs and ‘country shows’ as normal. Lobbyists work tirelessly to sell it as ‘conservation’, as ‘sustainable’, as ‘what the countryside is for’. Conservation is not raptor persecution and the destruction of whole layers of biodiversity so that a saleable product survives just long enough to be shot. There is nothing sustainable about releasing so many pheasants that at this time of the year (just before the shooting starts) the total weight of all those birds (their biomass) is more than all the other birds in the country combined. And the countryside is not the private playground of the shooting industry: it is home to wildlife, woodlands, rivers, and ecosystems that sustain life. To reduce it to notions of a shooting gallery is both delusional and damaging.
And behind all of this violence is profit. The scramble for profit is built into the hugely exploitative way that pheasant farms are run, the way shoots operate, why some pubs and hotels peddle themselves to ‘shooting parties’ as if people who have spent a day killing birds need – deserve – to be pampered and rewarded.
End Bird Shooting
When we launched the End Bird Shooting Substack in April 2025, we wrote that we are fighting to end all bird shooting in the UK. We set up the Substack to put a focus on the bird hooting industry that the more general Protect the Wild Substack naturally doesn’t have.
That’s why we write posts like this one. We’ve been told (numerous times) that the industry is ‘too big’, too ‘well supported’, too ‘influential’. Nothing is too big, and it is nowhere near as well-supported as it likes to tell us. It absolutely can be challenged. We will ask different questions and put things in different ways. We will change the narrative around shooting.
And that starts by all of us recognising and calling out this appalling industry for what it is: violent, aggressive, exploitative, and cruel.