As both pro-shoot and pro-wildlife sides know, the pheasant shooting ‘season’ begins again in less than two weeks (see Protect the Wild’s Cruelty Timeline for details of ‘seasons’ for birds and mammals across the UK).
Between October 1st and February 1st, around 50 million pheasants, ten million Red-legged Partridges, and around a million Mallards, almost all reared as livestock in wire-mesh cages on farms before being trucked around the country and released as ‘wild birds’, will become the live targets of so-called ‘sportsmen’. Many will be killed by visitors to vast shooting estates, far too many of which have been developed in the heart of ‘national parks’ or in National Landscapes (what we used to know as AONBs, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty).
Conholt Park
One such estate is Conholt Park. Situated within the chalk grasslands of the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, Conholt has been owned since 2022 by Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group. Schwarzman has been rapidly transforming the Park into a shooting estate, notably complaining to UK chancellor Rachel Reeves that his plans were being slowed by a colony of Great Crested Newts – a grumble from a singularly influential man that we can’t help wondering might be partly behind her disgraceful comment that she wanted the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to cut red tape so that developers can “stop worrying about the bats and the newts”.
‘Bags’ of 500 pheasants a day will be served up to paying shooters at Conholt. This means that each shooter in a group of ten would be expecting to kill around 50 birds each, an appalling level of harm and cruelty which has even been noted by the pro-shoot Daily Telegraph under the headline “Billionaire with Trump ties criticised over super-sized pheasant shoots”.
A spokesperson for the estate told the Telegraph (tellingly) that “Like many estates across the UK, Conholt Park releases pheasants and partridges…”. Indeed they do, and it’s this ‘normalisation’ – this warped image of ‘what a country estate does’ – that has led to such vast numbers of birds being dumped into an already-stressed wildlife-depleted countryside for ‘sport’.
Where do all these birds come from?
We were asked by the Telegraph to contribute our thoughts on “big pheasant shoots” but our statement wasn’t used. It would be pretty much the same whatever the size of the shoot because we see birds as individuals not ‘bags’, and killing is killing no matter how many birds are involved, but 500 birds shot in a day is a huge number.
It raises a number of questions. The obvious one is, why do shooters gravitate towards shoots that serve up so many birds that the air will be thick with them. Where is the ‘challenge’ shooters love to romanticise when literally clouds of birds are being repeatedly flushed towards them? It’s a scenario where the most clueless cosplaying gunowner should find it almost impossible to miss, where there is no ‘skill’ demanded and no ‘fieldcraft’ needed. The answer presumably lies in bragging rights, a ceasless demand for ‘more’, and ‘not caring’ – the complete lack of any empathy towards the animals they are killing. It certainly doesn’t lie anywhere close to ideas of ‘sportsmanship’ or ‘tradition’, and it’s a long, long way from any outdated thinking about ‘one for the pot’.
But another is how on earth do so many birds end up in one place like that?
Experienced birders would never expect to find that many birds on a chalk downland let alone get anywhere near them (and 500 a day only refers to the birds that are hit, remember, not the total number on the estate). Away from tidal flats and perhaps refuges like inland lakes, birds – at least in the impoverished landscapes of England – simply don’t exist in numbers like that anymore.
We doubted any shooters would take up our suggestion, but we also said to the Telegraph that customers at Conholt need to ask themselves how it’s possible for them to line up to kill so many birds day after day after day.
The short answer is an intensive, industrialised production system. Vast numbers of birds are reared for the gun on farms, where every single step that takes these birds from ‘egg to gun’ is a living nightmare of raised, near-barren cages, terrible biosecurity, and the (unlawful) inability to express even basic natural behaviours before they are dumped outside, flushed by dogs, and shot out of the sky for ‘fun’.
‘Life’ for the millions of pheasants and partridges sold to shooting’s complicit clientele by estates up and down the UK, is short, loud, unnatural, and brutal. When they are dumped into the ‘real world’ they are bewildered and uncertain. Whether you are opposed to shooting or not, it’s simply not possible to describe lining up to shoot birds bred in this way as ‘sporting’ in any way at all.
When even your friends are asking questions…
Shooting often complains about ‘antis’ maligning their ‘sport’. Damn right we do. Every baleful element of the shooting industry – from factory farming through to eradicating native predators and wildlife crime – deserves to be maligned (and that is all it deserves).
It is, though, one thing when we say it. What does shooting make, we wonder, of questions about the excess of slaughter at an estate owned by an extremely wealthy man being asked in the very traditional Daily Telegraph by a former editor of the Shooting Times?
We have said many times that shooting will bring itself to its knees because it is so manifestly out of step with shifting public awareness of animal sentience and the twin crises of the biodiversity and climate emergencies.
The industry has done a reasonably good job convincing the public that flooding the countryside with farmed, non-native birds is somehow ‘conservation’. If manipulating entire landscapes to ensure the killing of 500 factory-farmed birds a day is ‘conservation, it is a peculiarly bastardised version of it.
And back in the real world, advertising such enormous ‘bags’ of dead birds may seem ‘normal’ to the shooting industry but it is repellent to the majority of us. If even your friends are raising their eyebrows, it really doesn’t suggest the long-term future that this appalling industry seems to think it ‘deserves’…