Animal Aid

Please get involved in Animal Aid’s National Anti-Shooting Week and help us to spread the word about the cruelty and wastefulness of the ‘game bird’ shooting industry, thereby persuading people to demand a ban on the production of birds for ‘sport’ shooting in Britain.

Annually, around 50 million pheasants and partridges are purpose-bred to be used as feathered targets. Only about 15% of these will actually be eaten.

It is vital to remember that game birds are purpose-bred to be shot. People tend to believe that this ‘sport’ involves shooting a wild bird or two ‘for the pot’ – the notion of game birds as food being one projected by pro-bloodsports media campaigns – and are horrified to learn that pheasants and partridges are mass-produced on an industrial scale.

One of the first acts of the Coalition government’s new Minister for Hunting and Shooting, Jim Paice, was to withdraw a Code of Practice for game bird production that would have outlawed battery cages for breeding pheasants, and replace it with one that effectively allows the cages to stay – albeit in an ‘enriched’ form. We’ve filmed the ‘enriched’ cages several times and they are just as brutal as the barren version. Hundreds of thousands of breeding birds are confined inside these metal battery cages for the whole of their productive lives of around two years.

Adrian Sanders MP has tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM 224) against the use of battery cages for game birds kept for breeding purposes. His EDM points out that even the pro-shooting lobby group, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, opposes the use of battery cages.

We need as many people as possible to sign our form letter asking their local MP to support EDM 224. You can download copies from our website or order them from us. Please encourage friends, colleagues and people in your locality to sign. You can then send the signed ones back to us and we will forward them to your MP at the appropriate time.

Thank you for all your help.

Take action!

• Order bulk materials and EDM 224 form letters to do a street stall or leafleting
• Watch our undercover film from last shoot season and put a link to it on your Myspace and Facebook accounts
• Send this letter to your local newspaper
• Ask your MP to support a ban on cages for breeding birds
• Download this petition
• Find out more about ‘gamebird’ shooting