BREAKING: New footage of cruel bird traps and how you can help

Earlier this year, as part of our Killing Our Countryside campaign, we launched a second phase, exposing the use of cruel bird traps by the shooting industry.

As well as the mental distress suffered by the birds who are trapped in Larsen and Ladder traps, it is shocking that they face a brutal and terrifying death – often in front of other birds who must look on helplessly. All this destruction to protect the shooting industry, a business which breeds, releases and then kills millions of pheasants and partridges every year – for “sport”.

In 2026, our investigators have once again been filming and documenting the use of these cruel contraptions in the countryside. At a game farm in Worcestershire, investigators filmed a trapped magpie exhausting themselves as they desperately tried to escape the tiny cage.

At the same location a lone crow sits in a cage, in the middle of a field where they could clearly see any predator approaching, but not escape them. Confined and frightened, it is heart wrenching to think that the poor bird’s purpose is to lure other corvids into the cage – who would later be killed by a gamekeeper because they are deemed a nuisance.

In Glossop, investigators from the Hunt Investigation Team filmed a series of different traps, such as ladder traps, which contained incarcerated corvids who are used as ‘decoys’ to lure other corvids into the traps by their calls.

Again, the fear, frustration and panic of the decoy birds is hard to stomach – even more so as this cruelty exists only because corvids are accused of disrupting the smooth running of shooting estates by stealing the eggs of incarcerated pheasants and partridges.