“I don’t believe that you can profess to love nature, the environment or our wildlife and support the shooting of huge numbers of non-native pheasants & partridges, known to some as ‘Gamebirds’.”
That’s Chris Packham’s opening paragraph for a Foreword to Animal Aid’s latest report into the shooting industry. Titled Killing Our Countryside, it looks into the millions of non-native birds reared every year for shooting and focuses on “the numerous and diverse environmental impacts of the pheasants and partridges themselves, how they compete with native wildlife for resources and how their presence affects predator numbers and species (or groups of species) within ecosystems.”
Densely detailed (a huge amount of ground is covered in less than thirty pages), Animal Aid acknowledges that their report makes for ‘sobering’ reading, especially at a time “when nature is feeling the acute pressure of the climate and biodiversity emergencies” but says that one thing would “strengthen nature’s hand and remove some of the pressure threatening vulnerable birds and wildlife” – an end to bird shooting.
We couldn’t agree more…
Taking on the shooting industry
Animal Aid has a long and storied history when it comes to taking on the shooting industry (one we aim to emulate over the coming years!). Much of their work has focused on revealing conditions at breeding facilities.
Back in 2005, for example, they published Assault and Battery: The nightmare existence of egg-producing ‘game birds’, a report which demonstrated that the “caged birds suffer a high incidence of emaciation, feather-loss and back and head wounds.”
Undercover filming carried out at Heart of England Farms Ltd during June and July in 2017, again revealed Red-legged Partridges and pheasants confined in battery-style cages and the suffering involved. Many of the birds were stressed and in extremely poor condition. Several of the welfare issues, the charity stated, resulted from practices that were clear breaches of the government’s Code of Practice for rearing so-called game birds.
In 2018, Animal Aid called for a complete ban on raised laying cages used “to incarcerate breeding birds used by the shooting industry”, arguing that a ban on the use of the cages would at least “spare birds from the horror of being caged in these units, and would seriously limit the number of birds who could be bred for shooting.”
In July 2022, they were back undercover again, visiting a number of farms including the huge Bettws Hall, which when we listed it on bloodbusiness.info last year was said to be the largest breeder in the UK, raising 1.7 million non-native Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges a year for the gun.
Impacts on the countryside
The latest report has a slightly different slant. While still taking time to look into breeding conditions, Killing Our Countryside highlights the direct impacts on the environment of (for example) pheasant release pens, antimicrobial resistance, Avian Flu, pollution caused by lead shot, persecution of foxes and birds of prey, resource competition with native birds (it’s easy to forget just how large pheasants are when compared with passerines like finches, thrushes, and buntings), and predation by pheasants and partridges of invertebrates and other small animals (including threatened reptiles such as Common Lizards and Adders).
The latter was an issue that Wild Justice partly helped bring to public attention in 2020 when they mounted a legal challenge to force DEFRA (the UK government department responsible for policies and regulations related to the environment, food production, farming, fisheries, and rural communities) to review the harmful impacts of releasing pheasants and partridges near Natura 2000 protected wildlife sites. That action resulted in both the Pheasant and Red-legged Partridge being added to Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, a legally binding ‘list’ which contains largely introduced non-native species determined to cause ecological, environmental or socio-economic harm (such as Signal Crayfish, Grey Squirrel, and Japanese Knotweed).
Animal Aid state in their conclusion to Killing Our Countryside, that the way forward “needs to be a ban on the mass release and shooting of captive-bred pheasants and partridges” and while an immediate priority is ending the use of battery cages they note that doing so would not change the severe problems endemic to the shooting industry: “the huge impacts on wildlife and the environment detailed in this report would still remain.”
That is absolutely true. The impacts would still remain. Animal Aid’s argument is similar to the reasoning behind our own antipathy to grouse moor licencing. As we have consistently argued, licencing to supposedly tackle raptor persecution in the uplands will do nothing to stop the destruction of wild birds, predators, and the environment that takes place there as well. Though grouse are not captive-bred, there is very little difference in the cumulative havoc wreaked in the lowlands to support the release of pheasants and partridges for shooting.
A ban is the only way to halt the destruction caused by shooting wherever it takes place.
Every nail in the coffin
It’s encouraging to note how thinking that might have once seemed controversial is now accepted as fact. Until a few years ago, even voicing an opinion counter to the pro wildlife-killing propaganda churned out by the likes of BASC, Moorland Association, and the Countryside Alliance would have led to furious denials, threats of litigation, and accusations of ‘not understanding the countryside’ or even (ludicrously) being ‘anti-countryside’.
Anyone who can remember the 2018 launch of Revive, the coalition for grouse moor reform based in Edinburgh, may perhaps also remember the hysterical reaction of BASC, the Scottish Countryside Alliance, Scottish Land and Estates, and the Scottish Association of Country Sports. They issued a joint statement claiming (counter to all the evidence) that “The fact is that for decades now, the grouse shooting community has been embracing reform and modernising land management practices.”
Rubbish like that is being challenged across the board now, from websites like ours to ‘game-changing’ Channel 4 News reports on raptor persecution. Even a once docile and broadly supportive mainstream media is questioning shooting’s excesses. A recent Daily Mail article discussed local anger caused by American financier Stephen Schwarzman’s plans to ‘enhance’ a pheasant shoot on his Wiltshire estate “with local sources claiming Mr Schwarzman is preparing for up to 500 birds to be shot a day”. One ‘shooter’ was quoted saying, ‘That’s not sport.’ No, it isn’t – and it never was…
Shooting has had decades to reform, but seems incapable of it. It fights even common sense changes like switching away from lead shot (an environmental contaminant thousands of tonnes of which shooters spray across the countryside every year). Its land practices are rooted in exploitation and exclusion (hedge-fund manager Alexander Darwall’s failed attempt to keep people off his pheasant shooting estate on Dartmoor was typical rather than unusual). As we reported just last week, grouse moors are wretched, barren places, degraded SSSIs incapable of supporting the biodiversity they were designated for.
The shooting industry has been ‘drinking in the last chance saloon’ for years. It is a wrecking ball, rampaging across the countryside, subsidised by the taxpayer, underpinned by the illegal killing of protected birds of prey, and completely out of sync with our ever-increasing awareness of those “climate and biodiversity emergencies”, animal sentience, and public focus on the environment.
Every report like Killing Our Countryside bolsters knowledge and provides data to counter the arguments/lies the shooting lobbyists rely on. It is very welcome and we applaud our colleagues at Action Aid for producing it.
Which doesn’t mean that we’re standing still ourselves of course. Please keep an eye out for an investigation that we’ve been funding over the last few months.
We can’t reveal any details just yet, but some of the material we’ve already gathered is going to be very damaging to an industry that has no place in 2025 and shouldn’t still exist at all.
- Killing Our Countryside by Animal Aid can be downloaded here.
