We will be shifting the focus of our ‘Investigations’ articles from the adult birds in their horrible cages to looking at WHY these birds are farmed so intensively. The answer of course is for EGGS. The shooting industry needs eggs so the whole vile cycle can be repeated year after year…if they simply blasted to death every pheasant they had in the autumn, their ‘fun and games’ would end right there.
And if we think life for an adult pheasant or partridge is rough, just wait until we show you how the chicks are treated…
In the meantime, there is something we want to look at quickly. When ITV News broadcast our undercover footage from Heart of England Farms, the Farm’s response was entirely predictable: a carefully produced Facebook video appeared, featuring healthy-looking birds in apparently clean conditions.
We get that. They weren’t going to show anyone the grime or the bodies. We will do that for them.
It’s the comments beneath that video that we want to address, though, because two arguments emerged that reveal far more about this industry and the attitudes about it than their authors intended.
The first was that the pheasants in the footage looked healthy and well cared for. No one shoving a prolapse back into a dying bird. No cannibalism, or birds attacking each other. No dying birds, or skips piled up with the corpses of birds who (in the words of staff) “gave up”).
Quelle surprise! What exactly did viewers expect an industry-produced and industry-controlled video response to an undercover investigation would look like?
Our investigator filmed what the farm looks like when nobody is supposed to be watching. If the conditions were the same, we would have turned off the camera and walked away. But they categorically were not. And our video and screenshots prove that is true.
‘Whataboutery’
The second argument is the one we want to spend some time on, because it is more revealing. Several commenters suggested that they would rather be a pheasant in a raised cage than a battery-farmed chicken.
What those commenters were attempting was a form of ‘whataboutery’ – the familiar rhetorical move of deflecting from one problem by pointing at another. But it is not a good defence of pheasant farming. It is a confession that pheasant farming belongs in exactly the same conversation as the factory farming of chickens – an industry that even people with few concerns for animal welfare rightly regard as one of the great moral failures of modern food production.
The “I’d rather be a pheasant than a chicken” line gets trotted out as though it’s a gotcha, but it’s nothing of the sort. No thinking person would choose either: not the chronic stress and feather-pecking of a battery shed, or the wire-floored, excreta-encrusted cages built to produce birds for the gun.
Pretending you’d cheerfully swap places isn’t a clever insight; it’s a false equivalency intended to make the commenter feel clever while changing nothing for the animal actually living it.
Confinement is confinement. If your argument for one form of caging an animal is “well, it’s not as bad as this other form of caging an animal,” you’ve already conceded the point you think you’re winning.
The commenters who said they would rather be a pheasant than a battery hen were not drawing a contrast between two different worlds. They were describing the same hellscape. And NEITHER are acceptable.
Here’s a challenge for the pro-shoot lobbyists on social media standing up for the suffering and misery we’ve been revealing. The images in this post are all of the breeding cages at Heart of England filmed last year: be honest – WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS?
OF COURSE YOU WOULDN’T.
Lack of protection
Those commenters trying to be ‘clever’ were – either deliberately or through ignorance – missing the point entirely.
- A battery hen lives in a wire cage. So do breeding pheasants.
- A battery hen cannot touch the ground, cannot forage, cannot dustbathe, cannot make meaningful choices about her own behaviour. Neither can breeding pheasants.
- A battery hen lives in chronic stress, in overcrowded conditions, surrounded by other stressed animals, with injurious pecking managed through physical intervention rather than by addressing the conditions that cause it. Replace the word “hen” in that sentence with “pheasant” and every single word remains true.
There is one difference between chicken farming and pheasant farming, though, and it is worth stating.
For all the horror of her existence, a battery hen is at least now protected by law. Since 2012, barren battery cages for egg-laying hens have been illegal in the UK. Battery cages were replaced by mandatory “enriched” cages with a legal minimum space requirement of 0.075m² per bird, nest boxes, litter and perches, all set out in binding regulations.
So-called ‘game birds’ like pheasants and partridges bred for shooting have no equivalent law.
They fall under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 which bans “unnecessary suffering” for any animal under the control of humans (either temporarily or permanently), and a non-statutory Defra Code of Practice stating that “barren raised cages for breeding pheasants and small barren cages for breeding partridges should not be used” and that laying systems should be “appropriately enriched”.
But that code sets no minimum cage size and is guidance rather than law with teeth. There’s no statutory instrument, no schedule, no minimum dimensions, no list of required features (in the way the laying hen regulations specify space, nest boxes, litter, and perches in hard numbers). “Appropriately enriched” is left entirely undefined, too, and the Code itself is non-binding guidance rather than a legally enforceable standard.
Tell us again how you’d rather be a pheasant…
The shooting industry has spent years trying to position itself as something categorically different from factory farming – a tradition, a countryside practice, a conservation effort.
What the comments beneath that Facebook video demonstrated is that even its own supporters saw the similarities. And saw them immediately. And instead of condemning what they saw, they tried to be clever instead. And they failed – badly.
Of course, on top of everything, after months of stress and fear, the pheasant is boxed-up, driven to a woodland or a moor, released, and then shot at by armed hobbyists as he or she is driven out of cover by dogs…
So we will again ask the pro-shoot lobbyists on social media standing up for the suffering and misery we’ve been revealing – WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS?
- Video and images 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.
End Bird Shooting
Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.
This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.
- We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.