Our annual campaign to disrupt the high-profile ‘Glorious 12th’ – the opening day of the gamebird shooting season – every August targeting the grouse moors of the north of England has been immensely successful. Many shoots now deliberately schedule opening meets later in the week and beyond to avoid us. However, today is where the volume of deaths rises significantly as the first of the primary quarry species, the red-legged partridge, enters the cross-hairs of the tweed-and-chequered-shirt-clad morons.
1st September sees the slaughter of partridges commence across England, Wales and Scotland – Northern Ireland starts on 1st Oct – and continues until 1st February next year. This is swiftly followed on 1st October with the even more voluminous release of pheasants to be blasted out of our skies. Whilst true that the number of intensively reared partridge and pheasant released to be shot accounts for the vast majority of birds killed every year, we shouldn’t overlook that many other species are also targeted by the trigger-happy goons with Ptarmigan and Snipe in August, Duck, Goose, Moorhen and Golden Plover in September and Woodcock in October.
We have featured the industrial scale of the breeding of partridges and pheasants, and their suffering in horrific conditions therein, on many occasions with the majority of eggs and chicks being imported from France every year. Back in 2021, we reported that the volume of birds brought into the UK was growing significantly in the years immediately prior to the Covid pandemic with a peak of around 30 million. This trend has continued ever since with current annual estimates now in the region of a mind-boggling 40 – 60 million. Partridges are believed to comprise around 20% of that total with the remainder being pheasant. Being smaller, more agile and stronger flyers means that they don’t give as much of a return on investment when it comes to the lead flying, so operators tend to favour the pheasant and this explains the lower number of imports of partridges.
Following importation, partridge chicks are grown-on in pens typically erected in open spaces and most usually at field edges – which visibly contrasts to pheasant pens that are most often to be found within woods. All locations will be surrounded by ‘cover crops’ – almost always strips of maize plants – into which the young birds will be released from the pens at the age of between 12 – 18 weeks. As there will be a plentiful supply of food and water provided within the cover and any predators in the area are eradicated by gamekeepers, the birds will typically remain within the cover before being ‘beaten’ out into the shooter’s sights in the weeks to come.
For all the smokescreen arguments thrown up by the shooting lobby, it is beyond doubt that the release and shooting of this volume of non-native birds into our eco-system is having widespread and extremely damaging impacts to the environment, biodiversity and human health. We have recently shared the major concerns that are now arising on the struggle to protect wild birds from avian flu outbreaks this year with gamebirds clearly a major risk factor given how many are being moved and released around the UK – see here for more details: Heightened Avian Influenza Risk Warning Issued – Hunt Saboteurs Association.
Animal Aid have recently released an excellent report which investigates these impacts in more depth and they are campaigning to get this barbarity banned before it completely wrecks the UK’s biodiversity. It can be downloaded for free here: Animal Aid: Killing Our Countryside.
The explosion in this brutally callous ‘sport’ is, unfortunately, entirely predictable. It is largely unregulated, relatively easy to set-up & operate and is highly lucrative as there appears to be no shortage of ghouls willing to pay hundreds of pounds for a day blasting scores of the poor birds away without a thought. These days there doesn’t appear to be any farmland or country estate that doesn’t display the tell-tale signs of cover crops and plastic bird feeders around the edges of harvested fields.
There are a few silver linings to all of this however. Firstly, the foxhound and beagle packs are increasingly losing their traditional hunting country as landowners can earn so much more money by offering shooting and once up and running, they don’t wish their punters’ day of sick enjoyment to be disrupted in any way and certainly not by these organised criminal gangs. Secondly, shoots are easily seen, heard and stopped by sabs who find themselves with a little bit of time on their hands. And lastly, the infrastructure of a shooting estate is relatively immobile and once it’s been spotted it can be closely monitored…
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