Many of our readers have been in touch to ask about the strange plastic devices visible on the beaks of birds in some of the images we’ve used with previous articles.
Many of us won’t have seen these things before, but what you are seeing are called beak guards and in the next few articles we will explain why they are used and how they are fitted. We think you will be shocked. We were.
Beak guards are plastic devices clipped through a bird’s nostrils to prevent the beak from closing fully. Plastic spectacles – rigid plastic blinders fitted over a male pheasant’s eyes to block his forward vision – are sometimes used alongside them: if they cannot see another pheasant directly in front of them, the thinking of the farm operator goes, they are significantly less likely to attack or chase each other.
Neither the poultry nor the shooting industry promotes these devices as standard husbandry. Quite the opposite. Industry guidance is explicit: beak guards are temporary management aids, to be used only as a last resort when all other interventions have failed.
In fact, guidance makes clear that they should never be the default response to aggression. Environmental changes – more space, improved lighting, better enrichment, reduced stocking density – must be attempted first.
This is the exact quote from the government’s ‘Code of practice for the welfare of gamebirds reared for sporting purposes’ (the highlighting is ours):
5.1 The use of management devices or practices that do not allow birds to fully express their range of normal behaviours should not be considered as routine and keepers should work towards the ideal of management systems that do not require these devices. Such devices and practices include mutilations such as beak trimming, procedures to prevent or limit flight such as brailing (placing a band on a wing to prevent extension of the wing), trimming of non-sensitive flight feathers and the use of bits, spectacles and hoods to prevent feather pecking, egg eating or aggression.
“Should not be considered as routine.” Heart of England, the pheasant and partridge breeding farm where an undercover investigator worked for a month, did not treat bits as a last resort. Our investigators found that fitting them WAS entirely routine.
At Heart of England, bird after bird was fitted with a plastic beak guard. Not some birds. Not birds showing extreme aggression. Almost all of them. Even sick birds. Even hen pheasants nearly blind with Mycoplasma.
Can you imagine the suffering of the birds in the images below? The ‘life’ these poor birds were ‘living’. No, we can’t either…
Regardless of whether individual animals had shown any aggressive behaviour at all, they were fitted with guards. This is not a welfare intervention. This is a production system that has accepted – and planned for – a level of animal suffering so routine that mutilating every bird’s face has simply become part of the process.
It also tells us that the people running this farm knew, or should have known, that their conditions were causing birds to attack one another. Aggression, feather pecking, even cannibalism – the behaviours that bits are designed to suppress – do not emerge in well-managed, low-stress environments. They are the product of confinement, overcrowding, boredom and fear. These are stress responses.
They are what happens when social animals with strong instincts to roam, forage, dustbathe and escape are denied all of those things. When ‘enrichment’ is a wooden board, and birds are stacked on top of each other in ‘colony cages’.
It tells you everything you need to know about what life is like inside facilities like these – and why birds like pheasants have no place in a cage.
Rather than address those root causes, Heart of England reached for the plastic clip. It is a revealing choice. The farm’s answer to the problem of birds living in conditions that drive them to harm one another was not to change the conditions. It was to change the birds. To physically prevent them from acting on impulses that their environment was producing in the first place.
This is the logic of the factory farm. When animals behave like animals, don’t fix the system: fix the animal.
How typical of an industry that complacently congratulates itself on its ‘welfare standards’ while cramming birds in bare cages for months then selling them to shoots for hobbyists to blow out of the air.
The implications go far beyond one farm, though. Pheasants are not domesticated animals. They are legally classified as wild birds in the UK, and the industry that breeds them commercially trades heavily on that identity. These are “wild” birds, we are told, released to live freely and naturally.
But the image of the wild pheasant sits in sharp contradiction with the reality of a shed full of birds with plastic clips on their faces, unable to peck, unable to behave normally, trapped in conditions so inadequate that without physical restraint they would tear each other apart.
There is no humane version of this system. The need for universal bitting is not a management failure at Heart of England specifically – it is proof of a structural impossibility. Pheasants are wild birds. Cage them in large numbers, deny them the space and stimulation their nature demands, and conflict is not a risk to be managed. It is a certainty.
The bit is not the solution to that problem. It is the admission that the problem cannot be solved.
In our next article, we will show you what the fitting of these devices actually looks like. Birds grabbed, held upside down in ‘bunches’, carried to a table or upturned crates full of scared pheasants, and pinned down while a plastic clip is forced through their nostrils. You can see the terror in their eyes.
The footage is difficult to watch. You may want to look away. We are asking you not to. We are asking you to stay with it, to witness what these birds – and millions like them in breeding farms across the country – endured every single day without choice, without relief, and without anyone to speak for them – until now.
The birds couldn’t turn away. Neither should we.
- Images and video recorded by our undercover investigator at Heart of England in 2025.
- We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.