To quote a breathless report in ‘Hello!’, the lightweight glossy for the many people who like to peek from the sidelines at the wealthy, “King Charles is reportedly ‘devastated’ following news that a key royal family tradition could soon be scrapped.” What might that ‘key’ tradition be? Distributing alms? Thanking those around him for ensuring he has to do almost nothing for himself? No, it would be killing Pheasants on the Sandringham Estate.
Yes, as the magazine breathlessly reveals to a shocked chattering class, the annual Boxing Day pheasant massacre is under threat because there aren’t ‘enough’ Pheasants. A ‘source’ claimed there were hardly any birds available for the shoot, “leading to an awkward situation that reportedly left the King unimpressed” and ‘livid’.
The article (which we’ve read so you don’t have to) goes on to say that “If the pheasant population issue is not resolved, the Boxing Day shoot may be called off for the foreseeable future. This would mark the end of one of the royal family’s most traditional seasonal pastimes.”
Unpicking it all
It’s difficult to know quite how the editors of ‘Hello!” imagined their readers would react to this trivial piece of ‘news’.
Would they share the frustration of the gun-toting Royal (who looks permanently unimpressed anyway, despite a lifestyle accessible to a vanishingly tiny percentage of the world’s population), tut a little and sagely muse how on earth Sandringham of all places could run out of Pheasants when it was the royals who established driven bird shooting here? (Most shooting in the UK was ‘walked up’ until 1840 when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A relentless shooter brought up on large-scale shoots, he immediately turned Windsor into a massive hunting estate. He reared Pheasants, imported hares, took to the grouse moors, and even acquired additional sporting rights over nearby Bagshot Park.)
Or will they instead ask themselves why on earth a grown man of 76 with more resources than Croesus would be ‘livid’ that he couldn’t end the lives of birds on a day when most families (including perhaps their own) just want to spend time together or enjoy a long, peaceful walk in the countryside? In fact, might they think that as someone who likes to portray themselves as a ‘conservationist (he has been Patron of the Wildlife Trusts since 1977 and Patron of the RSPCA since 2024, despite his widely-know support for fox hunting – he lobbied Tony Blair, pushing him not to ban hunting with hounds – and his multiple shooting estates), isn’t it about time Charles stopped the killing anyway?
Interestingly, ‘Hello!’ decided to find out. A ‘poll’ with the article is asking readers whether they think ‘this royal tradition should be axed’ – presumably permanently. At the time of writing (and we have to admit to being a little surprised at this) a huge 72% think it should be…
How many is ‘enough’?
Over 2/3rds of what is typically thought of as an ABC1 audience (in other words, a consumer from “one of the three higher social and economic groups, which consist of people who have more education and better-paid jobs than those in other groups”) want (for reasons the poll doesn’t delve into of course) the Windsor’s appalling ‘tradition’ of killing pheasants for fun axed.
Let’s pocket that stat for a moment, and ask another question: how many is enough? After all, Charles is said to be ‘livid’ that there aren’t ‘enough’ Pheasants to shoot.
Driven pheasant shooting is a numbers ‘sport’. Shoots routinely promise their complicit clients ‘bags’ of between 300 – 350 birds split between eight ‘gun’s’. Shooting lobbyists suggest that a ‘bag of 50’ birds is a good day (for the shooter not for the birds of course). Take that figure, multiply it by the number of shooting days over the entire ‘season’ and the thousands of large and small shoots killing Pheasants across the UK, and it’s not difficult to see how the figure of 40 million+ non-native pheasants being released into the countryside every year is reached. Which also leads to the remarkable and often quoted statistic that at the start of the shooting season in September the total biomass (or weight) of Pheasants in the countryside is well over that of ALL other Britain’s birds combined.
For the vast majority of us killing fifty birds in a day will be unimaginably abhorrent, for the shooter it is apparently the norm. No ‘bag’ figures are given for shoots at Sandringham, but a horrifying paragraph in a December 2024 issue of fellow glossy mag (with a similarly exclamation marked title) ‘OK!’ lifted the lid:
“King Charles would regularly host shooting parties on the Sandringham estate during his student days. He may now have assumed Prince Philip’s former role of “hunt leader”, although he is unlikely to try to match his father’s kill in 1993, when he apparently struck 10,000 pheasants during a seven-week stay at Sandringham.”
‘Struck’? What a pathetic euphemism for ‘gunned down’…
Charles is probably used to killing what most readers here would consider vast amounts of birds on his Boxing Day family get-together. Given his comments we can perhaps assume that there is no definition of ‘enough’ – but clearly there is a figure that is ‘not enough’. For an individual used to having whatever they want whenever they want it, that – to quote another report – ‘not enough’ is just ‘not good enough’.
Photo by Ben Seymour on Unsplash
Collateral damage
The media reports that are carrying this non-story (yes, we’re writing about it too, but only because we are so strongly opposed to the nominal head of state setting such a poor example) say that one of Sandringham’s long-serving gamekeepers has been ‘let go’ – in other words fired. By the King himself apparently.
That in itself is quite the thought. One of the world’s most privileged people firing a man on a low wage for not producing enough birds for him to kill on a Christmas shoot. A novel twist on the origins of Boxing Day, which are rooted in the tradition of the giving of gifts and a day off for servants…
It might come as something as a surprise that Sandringham would have any ‘gamekeepers’ at all, but they are used – like gamekeepers everywhere – to kill as many as possible of the estate’s wild animals that threaten the Pheasants their employer wants to kill in any way at all. Perhaps ‘Hello!’ mentions the firing as a precautionary tale of not pissing off some of the most spoilt people in the country, or perhaps to suggest we should have sympathy for a job lost. Regardless, it is the thousands of wild animals – from corvids to foxes and stoats – that are killed on royal estates every year that are the true ‘collateral damage’ of this ‘sport’ so beloved by the nation’s ‘conservationist’ elite.
Reading the room
Given the reaction in comments ‘below the line’ in various media, an encouraging majority have zero sympathy for a monarch who just over a year ago was rightly being showered with praise for his handling of a cancer diagnosis. Yes, he had the world’s best doctors on standby but it would be churlish not to admire how he reflected on the incredible work of medical staff everywhere, and how he stated his disease had brought into “sharp focus the very best of humanity” telling representatives of cancer charities,“You have my whole family’s deepest admiration.”
We agree 100%, the professionals working to help cancer sufferers are remarkable indeed. But we also have to note (with sadness) that Charles’ illness doesn’t appear to have helped him develop an empathy with life in a more general sense. Like most hunters and shooters he grew up with a conviction that some animals just don’t merit a seconds thought, and that is a mindset he doesn’t seem willing or able to change.
Which piuts him increasingly out of step with public recognition of animal sentience, of animal intelligence, and of crashing biodiversity. Despite the support of ‘the royals’ more and more of us are seeing shooting for the cruel and outdated industry it really is. And (hopefully we will be playing an increasing role in this) are understanding that pheasants are not ‘gamebirds’ put here for people like Charles to gun down, but birds like any other.
Will he change? It seems unlikely given the childish response to having one of countless day’s shooting taken away from him. He has other estates and other places to shoot. He will undoubtedly find somewhere to host him and his guns on Boxing Day.
More pertinent is to ask how long before public pressure and articles in the like of ‘Hello!’ question why this absurd and repulsive tradition of killing birds still exists at all? That will come before too long, we are sure of it. Another question on the back of that certainty might be to ask why Charles doesn’t simply ‘read the room’ and score a public victory by getting ahead of the criticism that will only grow over the years (especially as the contrast between an increasingly fragile, elderly man blasting healthy, young birds out of the skies grows ever more apparent).
