The trouble with shooting
Animal Aid’s new publication, The Trouble with Shooting, is a short and informative guide for anyone who wants to know more about the mass-production of pheasants, partridges and ducks, destined to become feathered targets for shooters. It also details how grouse populations are boosted by intensively managing moorland and killing large numbers of indigenous predator animals.
This time of year is the start of the breeding season for the nearly 50 million pheasants and partridges who are produced annually for shooters. In July 2010, the Hunting and Shooting Minister, Jim Paice, withdrew a Code of Practice for ‘game bird’ production that would have outlawed battery cages for breeding pheasants. It was replaced by a watered down version of the Code, which will effectively allow the cages to stay – albeit in their so-called ‘enriched’ form. Partridges are still confined inside metal boxes – a particularly distressing thought as the weather starts to heat up.
Many birds do not die instantly after being shot and those birds who are not retrieved face the prospect of a slow and agonising death from their wounds. For the ‘lucky’ few who make it through to the end of the shooting season, death by starvation, predation or under the wheels of cars is a likelihood.
The industry’s own figures show that the majority of shot birds are not sold as food, and there are reliable accounts of birds being buried in specially-dug pits because there is so little demand for their meat.
They are bred for the purpose of becoming a living target, to indulge the sick appetites of a violent few.
More details, as well as photos taken from our undercover investigations, can be seen in the new booklet, so please order your free copy of The Trouble With Shooting straight away.