Undercover footage reveals suffering of wild birds in cruel trap

Posted on the 22nd September 2018

We have just released a short film using undercover footage shot at a game farm, showing the suffering endured by birds in Larsen traps. We set a long-running camera filming two Larsen traps at Bonson Wood Game Farm in Somerset on 28 and 29 June, covering a period of 47 hours and 12 minutes.

Larsen traps are commonly used by the shooting industry to catch crows and magpies, who are blamed for any reduction in the numbers of game birds produced for the shooting season. The traps usually contain one bird in a compartment, whose distressed cries attract other birds into another compartment of the trap. The trapped birds are then killed by the game keeper. In this case, there were two traps set side by side. One trap had a single decoy bird in a compartment. The other trap had three birds crammed together in the decoy compartment.

Animal Aid’s new film uses a speeded-up timer to demonstrate the amount of time the crows are left in the Larsen trap. It is not known how long they had already been in the trap, nor how much longer they were confined. What is clear, however, is that the birds were stressed, and desperate to be released.