End Bird Shooting for Sport
Every year, millions of birds are killed in the name of ‘entertainment’.
Pheasants and partridges are intensively farmed in huge numbers to be shot. Grouse moors are managed so that unnaturally high numbers of birds can be driven towards waiting guns. Wildfowlers shoot ducks and geese as they come into land. Shooters still kill declining shorebirds including snipe and woodcock.
When shooting begins, birds are deliberately frightened into flight and driven over lines of waiting guns. Some are killed immediately. Others are wounded, fall away from the shoot and may suffer before they are found, killed or die from their injuries.
The cruelty is not limited to the birds being shot.
Animals perceived as a threat to profits are trapped and killed. Native wildlife is treated as an obstacle to producing more birds for the guns. On grouse moors, land may be managed through burning and intensive predator control to maintain artificially high numbers of red grouse. The Government acknowledges that rotational burning has contributed to the degradation of England’s peatlands, with consequences for carbon storage, biodiversity and wildlife habitats.
Shooting also dumps lead ammunition into the environment. Lead is toxic, has no agreed safe level of exposure and can contaminate the wider food chain and the countryside. The Government has already accepted the need to restrict lead ammunition because of the risks it presents.
This is not conservation. It is not necessary. It is a commercial pastime built around making living animals into targets.
The industry may point to habitat management carried out on shooting estates, but that does not justify breeding or manipulating wildlife populations so that animals can be killed for amusement. We should protect habitats because wildlife has an inherent right to live there, not because animals can be converted into live targets.
If a proposal for a shooting industry was pitched today, no reasonable government would allow it.
Small reforms are not enough.
Banning certain cages while allowing the birds to be bred, released and shot does not solve the fundamental problem. Regulating release densities does not make shooting compassionate. Changing ammunition does not make killing animals for entertainment acceptable.
A less intensive version of cruelty is still cruelty.
No code of practice, licence or voluntary assurance scheme can change that central fact that the purpose of this industry is to place birds in front of guns so that people can kill them for recreation.
Bird shooting belongs to a past in which animals and the countryside were treated as possessions for the enjoyment of a privileged few.
There is no place for it in modern Britain.
We call on the Government to end the intensive production and mass release of birds for shooting, ban driven grouse shooting, and make shooting any and all birds for sport unlawful.
Add your name to our END BIRD SHOOTING petition to the Minister for Nature and help build the movement to end it: go to END BIRD SHOOTING
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