Background notes on the pheasant shooting industry
- Every year in Britain, around 35 million pheasants and millions more partridges are mass-produced like commercial poultry so that they can be shot down by wealthy 'guns', who commonly pay £1,000 per day for the 'privilege'.
- Scores of thousands of egg-laying pheasants are confined for the whole of their productive lives (around two years) in the kind of battery cages used for laying hens, which have been condemned across Europe because they are considered to be inhumane.
- One male and eight to ten female pheasants are imprisoned inside what is essentially a galvanised steel box fitted with a wire mesh sloping floor (so that the eggs can roll through for easy collection) and a flexible net roof.
- Animal Aid’s 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 eggs are collected, incubated in ovens and, once hatched, pheasant chicks are moved to heated sheds, each typically holding one or two hundred birds. Attached to each shed is a small outdoor covered run, to which the birds have access once they are considered hardy enough.
- At seven or eight weeks they are moved from the sheds to release enclosures - large fenced-in units that can hold thousands of birds.
- In an effort to eliminate the bird-on-bird aggression caused by the crowded conditions in the rearing sheds and release pens, gamekeepers fit the pheasants with various devices. These restrict their vision and prevent them from pecking at their cage mates.
- As the partridge and pheasant shooting seasons approach (they run from 1 September to 1 February) the birds are encouraged into fields of cover crops and, come shooting days, are beaten up into the sky to serve as feathered targets.
- Because of the enfeeblement that results from being reared in sheds, around half of the birds die before they can be gunned down. They perish from exposure, starvation, disease, predation or under the wheels of motor vehicles.
- Given that a small group of shooters can kill up to 500 birds a day, many of the victims are not actually eaten. According to an editorial in Country Life magazine (February 1, 2001) some of the 'surplus' is buried in specially dug holes. Added to these casualties are the numerous unretrieved birds who die slowly from their gunshot wounds, out of sight of the guns.
- Large numbers of pheasants and partridges inevitably attract - and, in fact, boost the populations of - predator species such as stoats, weasels, foxes and members of the crow family. Gamekeepers deliberately kill them by setting traps and snares. But species ranging from badgers to cats and dogs - even protected birds of prey like owls and kestrels - are caught and killed. Millions of animals are slaughtered every year in these 'predator control' programmes.
- There is no law specifically governing ‘game bird’ production, only a self-serving industry code of practice. The government - as part of its Animal Welfare Bill proposals - is getting set to adopt this industry code. It would thereby legitimise the most brutal form of factory farming on behalf of an industry dedicated to producing millions of birds every year so that they can be shot down principally for sport.
- The basic animal protection laws in the UK decree that an offence is committed when an animal is subjected to 'unnecessary suffering'. There are many views on what constitutes unnecessary suffering. At one end of the spectrum is the pain animals endure undergoing veterinary treatments designed to advance or preserve their health. At the opposite pole, in Animal Aid's view, is the bird shooting industry where purpose-bred animals are shot for pleasure. The suffering experienced by these birds, while they are being fattened for the kill and as they repeatedly run the gauntlet of the guns, cannot plausibly be justified as 'necessary'.
- In Holland, producing birds for 'sport shooting' was first curbed in 1986 and outlawed entirely in 2002. The action was taken because the practice was judged to be morally and environmentally unsupportable. Animal Aid is calling for a similar ban to be introduced into Britain.
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