SHOOTING
Background information for Gamebird consultation
- Annually in Britain, more than 45 million pheasants and partridges are purpose-bred to be used as feathered targets. According to the industry itself, a mere 8 million are sold to game dealers. Even pro-shooting articles have made reference to birds being buried in specially-dug pits because there is so little demand for their meat.
- Hundreds of thousands of pheasants and partridges are confined for the whole of their productive lives (around two years) in the kind of battery cages used for egg-laying hens. Made of wire mesh, and holding around eight female pheasants and one male, the contraptions expose the birds to the elements all year round. Partridges are confined in breeding pairs in metal boxes that are correspondingly smaller and just as bleak as the pheasant units.
- The cages were first exposed nationally by Animal Aid when its undercover footage was broadcast on the BBC’s Countryfile programme in November 2004. Our undercover evidence demonstrates that the caged birds suffer a high incidence of emaciation, feather-loss and back and head wounds. Many of the pheasants lunge repeatedly at their cage roofs in a forlorn attempt to escape. The resulting damage to their heads is known as ‘scalping’. In an effort to eliminate the aggression between the birds caused by the crowded conditions in the breeding cages, rearing sheds and release pens, the birds are fitted with various devices. These restrict their vision and prevent them from pecking at other birds. Even so, many birds still suffer injuries and are fitted with protective dressings.
- Animal Aid also covertly filmed examples of ‘enriched’ cages. They generally have a plastic ‘curtain’ set towards the back for a small measure of privacy, and a piece of dowel resting on bricks for perching. In reality, these ‘improvements’ make little difference to the bleak prisons or to the distress of the caged birds.
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