Highlow Estate Shoot Investigation
Who cares?
Not the shooting industry.
The shooting industry is all about selling birds to shooters to use as live targets on ‘days out’. It supports a cruel hobby that masquerades as a ‘sport’.
Shooting profits by rearing flocks of near-tame birds to kill, promising its clients huge ‘bags’ (the disrespectful collective term they use rather than referring to individual birds) and charging them hundreds of pounds a day for the privilege of standing in a valley by a woodland while ‘beaters’ drive the unsuspecting birds towards them.
It’s obvious that they don’t care about the birds they send out to be shot, but you would think that they would at least properly look after the young birds in their care before then.
In fact, as footage taken by the Hunt Investigation Team (HIT) in the summer of 2022 clearly shows, the shooting industry doesn’t even care about ‘their’ birds when they’re young and still growing.
"In under 90 seconds we can clearly see how poorly maintained pens leave young birds trapped in loose netting, unable to escape."
Protect the Wild
The video we published was filmed during the 2022 heatwave on an estate in Derbyshire, though it could have been taken almost anywhere the shooting industry has set up shop.
It shows young Pheasants and Red–legged Partridges in the rearing pens typically used by the shooting industry. In less than 90 seconds we can clearly see how poorly maintained pens leave young birds trapped in loose netting, unable to escape. How diseases like ‘bulgy eye’ (infectious diseases caused by micro-organisms called mycoplasmas) are rife within the industry. How the industry’s casual approach to the proper disposal of dead bodies is risking even more disease – including the spread of the highly pathogenic virus that causes Avian Flu – by leaving them for swarms of flies, or even for other young birds to eat.
