Yesterday we told you that the birds driven into the sky this autumn during partridge shooting ‘season’ are not the wild coveys the shooting industry likes to advertise in its brochures.

The non-native Red-legged Partridge and the increasingly rare, Red-listed Grey Partridge, are in fact factory-farmed, bred by the million in commercial units, and trucked out to release pens solely so they can be shot for entertainment.

In this follow-up article we’re showing you exactly what that factory farming looks like, using footage taken by an undercover investigator who filmed on a ‘game farm’ rearing both species.

As we have stated many times, what was documented was in no way an aberration. This is the ordinary, everyday infrastructure of an intensive industry that produces tens of millions of birds a year for the gun - and it is grim.

Crowded, filthy, and out of sight

The footage consistently shows sheds packed with birds, and tier upon tier of wire ‘colony’ cages stacked one above another. Dust and matted plumage cling to the cage bars. The mesh floors are thick with droppings, feathers and debris.

Wild partridges walk, forage and dust-bathe their way through hedgerows and stubble all day long, living in tight coveys and rarely flying unless they have to. On ‘game farms’ they are birds with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no way to express anything resembling natural behaviour.

A senior member of staff overseeing the farm’s breeding Red-legged Partridges told our undercover investigator that some of the birds had been caged like this for up to two years - half the natural lifespan of a wild bird. Hardly surprising if you stop to think about what they are denied.

Grey Partridges on the ‘game farm’ suffered in the same way. Think about that the next time you read about partridge ‘conservation projects’ - shooting funds conservation projects for the Grey Partridge with one hand, and breeds and confines them in cramped commercial cages with the other. Either way, the outcome is the same: the birds will be shot dead for ‘sport’.

This would be a strange kind of doublethink for anyone else, but it's nothing unusual for an industry that has been gaslighting the public about its so-called conservation credentials for decades.

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A cage beside the cattle

One image from the investigation stands out for a different reason. It shows a large cage of Red-legged Partridges positioned directly alongside a cattle pen. The cage is filthy: caked droppings, soiled bedding and debris visible through the mesh, within feet of grazing cattle.

Basic hygiene and biosecurity practices exist precisely to prevent this kind of set-up. Government guidance is clear that livestock and other animals can carry disease on their feet and fur, and should be kept well away from birds' housing and food.

What was filmed matters. Avian influenza outbreaks in the past have forced restrictions and lockdowns and led to Defra issuing a warning in August 2025 to “Bird keepers…particularly those involved in running a shoot or game bird rearing“ of a “heightened avian influenza risk”.

Whether or not this particular farm has breached any biosecurity regulations is a question for the relevant authorities, but the state of the cage alone would concern any vet: caked droppings and soiled bedding are exactly the kind of contamination guidance says should be removed and cleaned daily.

Partridges are known to be susceptible to Avian influenza. A filthy cage stacked close to livestock is not a small detail. It is a perfect illustration of an industry that talks constantly about its “environmental” and “custodian of the countryside” credentials while, behind locked gates, it is cutting every corner that it can.

The industry’s own standard

A point we have also made repeatedly is that this is not a rogue operator or a farm in special measures.

None of the farms the investigator filmed at for this series of articles is unusual. What we are showing you is what routine partridge (and pheasant) production for the gun looks like at scale, only it is normally hidden from view and from the millions of people who will never set foot on a shoot but who care about how animals are treated.

The shooting industry’s trade bodies talk about welfare codes and responsible practice. Our investigator’s footage shows over and over again what those words amount to: overcrowded cages, filth, and total disregard for the animals bred to be shot at for ‘sport’.

A complicit clientele

There is no version of “responsible” shooting that doesn’t start with birds raised like this, and as we have been saying throughout this series, none of this cruelty and exploitation exists in a vacuum.

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Factory farms like these exist because there is a market for what they produce. That market is paying clients - the people who book a day’s shooting, hand over hundreds or thousands of pounds, and stand in a field waiting for birds bred in exactly these conditions to be driven over their heads.

We suspect they never think about the tiered cages, the ammonia, the birds pacing endlessly on wire mesh, or a Red-legged Partridge crammed into a filthy cage beside a cattle pen. But that disconnection is not an excuse. It is a choice, not an accident.

Anyone who pays to shoot a partridge or a pheasant this autumn must know that they are funding this industry to keep running exactly as it is. There is plenty of evidence available, and it is becoming impossible to ignore.

Shooters are part of the system, and they are complicit in it. All this suffering is on them too.

• Images recorded by an undercover investigative team in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

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End Bird Shooting

Our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• If you have information about a farm, shoot or estate you think we should be looking into, please let us know.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We have concentrated on pheasants so far, but many ‘game farms’ also rear partridges for the gun, and it is these small birds that we are focussing on in the next two articles.

Every year on 1 September, without much ceremony or public attention, vast areas of the countryside are suddenly blighted by the percussive sound of gunfire.

This marks the start of the so-called partridge shooting ‘season’, a four-month window in which hundreds of thousands of small birds will be driven into the air over the hedgerows and stubble fields of rural Britain and shot for entertainment. It runs until 1 or 31 January, depending on where you are in the UK, and its start is followed a month later by the even bigger pheasant ‘season’.

Two very different birds, the same grim story

Two species of partridge are legally shot in this country: the Grey Partridge Perdix perdix and the Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa.

The Grey Partridge is Britain’s only native partridge. It was recently Red Listed as a species of the highest conservation concern in the UK, having suffered catastrophic population declines linked to intensive agriculture and habitat loss since the mid-twentieth century (the BTO states a 93% decrease from 1967 to 2024). The shooting industry’s own research bodies also acknowledge that large-scale releases of non-native Red-legged Partridges onto shooting estates put surviving wild Grey Partridges at risk, because shooters frequently cannot - or do not bother to - tell the two species apart in flight.

The Grey Partridge is a bird the countryside is losing. And yet, extraordinarily, it remains legal to shoot huge numbers during the very ‘season’ that opens this week. A species already on the brink is being killed, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as so-called ‘accidental’ collateral, in the name of ‘sport’.

The Red-legged Partridge, sometimes called the French Partridge, has a different but equally troubling story. Red-legs are not native to Britain. They were introduced from continental Europe in the eighteenth century for the same purpose they are used for today: to be shot at.

Industry figures put the number of Red-legged Partridges released into the UK countryside somewhere in the region of ten to twelve million birds every single year, with large numbers of eggs and chicks imported from breeding operations in France to feed demand.

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Unlike the Grey Partridge, the Red-legged Partridge isn’t Red Listed here. Shooting organisations often point to this as evidence that Red-legged Partridge shooting is somehow benign. But framing this as a conservation non-issue misses the point entirely. Red-legs are only here because people want to shoot them.

And far from being a conservation success story, the bird that UK shooters start to kill from this week is classified globally as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with local populations in both France and Spain experiencing noticeable declines: it’s estimated that, in the last two decades, the wild Spanish population has fallen by around 33%. Shooters there still kill them, of course.

‘Wild’ birds intensively bred on ‘factory farms’

The shooting industry likes to present both species as part of the natural, timeless fabric of the British countryside - wild birds living wild lives. As so often, it is gaslighting the public because the reality is very different. The Grey and Red-legged Partridges shot in the UK overwhelmingly begin life not in a hedgerow nest but on a commercial breeding unit - what we, and increasingly others, are right to call a ‘factory farm’.

Footage filmed by our undercover investigation team shows this in detail. Rather than a scattering of wild birds thriving on well-managed farmland, as the industry’s marketing so often suggests, they found rows of raised cages and sheds housing enormous numbers of Grey and Red-legged Partridges.

Adult breeding birds are kept in cramped cages or pens for egg production. Eggs are collected and hatched in industrial incubators. Chicks are reared in their thousands in barns and pens under artificial heat and light, in conditions that bear far more resemblance to poultry production than to anything most people picture when they imagine a partridge in the wild.

Not all of them survive, as the bucket of dead Red-legs in the image below proves…

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These are not wild animals living wild lives interrupted by a single shot. They are farmed animals, produced at industrial scale, whose entire short existence has been engineered around one outcome: their deaths, for the amusement of paying clients.

Talking of ‘paying clients’, it’s also worth noting that partridges - small birds with an explosive take-off and fast, low flight - aren’t always shot ‘cleanly‘. Wounding rates are significant - birds hit but not killed outright, left to die in the undergrowth or killed by a gun dog, are a routine and largely unspoken part of this industry.

A final question for the people pulling the trigger

Shooting lobbyists BASC like to sell killing partridges as “steeped in heritage, where every bird is hard-earned and every covey is memorable”, but blasting millions of factory-farmed birds flushed from in front of you is hardly ‘hard-earned’ (except by the birds) and we are highly sceptical that any shooters can remember ‘every covey’ they have killed on yet another day out in yet another field on yet another commercial shoot.

However, many shooters would say they love the countryside. Many would say they love wildlife. And yet they are willing to pay substantial sums of money to stand in a field and fire at small birds that were bred in sheds, trucked out to release pens, and driven into the air specifically so they could be killed - including, in the case of the Grey Partridge, a species Britain is actively failing to save from extinction in the wild.

As the guns take to the fields this week, the question End Bird Shooting will keep asking is this: how can anyone who claims to care about the countryside or wildlife take part in this organised slaughter and still convince themselves it is ‘sport’?

• Images recorded by an undercover investigative team in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

On 30 June, 2026, a walker on Morven Hill, near Dinnet in Aberdeenshire, found a dead Red Kite. Police Scotland has now confirmed that a protected bird of prey had been poisoned. Again.

Wildlife Crime Liaison Officer Ann Ashman appealed for information, and warned that whoever used this poison put other wildlife, passers-by, and companion animals at risk too.

That’s the story as it’s been told. Here’s what every version we’ve looked at has left out: Morven Hill sits on Dinnet Moor, a driven grouse shoot under intensive management since at least 2014, with a documented history of felled and burned woodland, muirburn to the water’s edge on protected watercourses, and predator control that campaigners have long argued crosses the line into illegality.

Choices

Red Kites are a Schedule One species protected in England, Wales, and Scotland by the Wildlife and Countryside Act. The bird died on a grouse moor, yet the story reads as if it died in a void.

That omission doesn’t appear neutral to us. It’s an editorial choice, made over and over again. Somebody also made a choice to unlawfully set out a poison in the open, putting at risk not just birds of prey but other wildlife and companion animals; and that same somebody did it on ground that is actively worked for shooting.

Leave that out and you haven’t shortened the story - you’ve edited out the lead. For some reason, presumably to do with influence, there is an avoidance, a reluctance, of reporting that in fact the poisoning of raptors is almost routine on grouse moors.

The shooting industry is repeatedly granted a favour it doesn’t deserve and which it hasn’t earned.

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Was this Aldicarb - again?

We don't yet know what killed this bird, and we won't pretend otherwise. But it's worth understanding why the substance matters, because raptor poisoning in the UK has a signature chemical, and it isn't a mystery which one it is.

Aldicarb is a carbamate insecticide so lethal it was banned across the EU in 2003, and it has been illegal to so much as possess in Scotland since the Possession of Pesticides (Scotland) Order came into force in March 2005. Yet it turns up again and again in confirmed raptor poisonings: a Red Kite killed with it near Braco in Perth and Kinross, confirmed by toxicology in September 2025; Peregrines poisoned with it in 2010 at a West Lothian quarry, the deaths kept quiet for over a year; Buzzards, Ravens and Rooks poisoned with it across the country for two decades running.

Amnesties were offered in 2011 and again in 2015 - the second, the Pesticides Disposal Scheme, ran for three months - to allow anyone with old stock to hand it in, no questions asked. Yet more than twenty years after the ban, and over a decade after that last amnesty closed, Aldicarb is still turning up in dead birds.

None of that tells us what was used at Morven Hill. It does tell us why aldicarb is one of the first questions worth asking when a raptor dies of poisoning here - and why the answer, whatever it turns out to be, deserves to be made public rather than left to quietly disappear into an "ongoing" file.

Pattern

There is no evidence linking anyone connected to the Dinnet Moor shoot to this bird’s death, and we won’t suggest that there is. But asking who else would have poisons, motive, and access to a moor run as a shoot is not idle speculation - it’s the most important question this wildlife crime actually raises. Yet it’s another omission that press coverage keeps side-stepping.

There is a ‘poisoning pattern’ here, and it’s worth being blunt about it.

It doesn’t mean that every gamekeeper is a wildlife criminal, but it does mean that poisons are killing protected birds, on land managed for shooting, often enough and across enough separate counties and separate years, that treating each case as an isolated, motiveless mystery stops being credible.

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That pattern is confirmed by the UK’s most important bird charity. We have issues with the RSPB’s policy on licencing grouse moors and its use of the word ‘gamebird’ (a word that we argue shouldn’t be used by anyone not connected with shooting), but their collation of crimes against birds of prey is second to none.

Its May 2026 report, Patterns of Persecution, recorded 921 confirmed attacks on protected birds of prey between 2015 and 2024. Of those 921 crimes, 236 were poisonings…

The RSPB also stated that 55% of confirmed incidents between 2015-2024 were linked to land managed for bird shooting: 21% grouse shooting, 28% pheasant and/or partridge shooting, and 6% mixed shooting.

Everything keeps pointing at the same kind of land management. The reporting keeps looking the other way...

‘Wilful blindness’?

The phrase “wilful blindness” - popularised by the Raptor Persecution UK blog and used by us to describe shooting’s paying customers looking away from what happens to Hen Harriers, Peregrines, Golden Eagles, and Short-eared Owls on the moors they shoot over - comes to mind. Grouse shooting has spent decades being reported on in an oddly passive voice. Birds “are found poisoned,” land is “managed,” and nobody is ever the subject of the sentence.

That grammar is doing some heavy lifting.

It is letting an industry with a documented, repeated, chemical-specific pattern of raptor persecution keep dodging the one piece of context that would let the public join the dots themselves.

The media must recognise the pattern. Must name the industry these poisons are being used by. Must say it over and over again every time until the pattern stops being deniable and starts being answered for.

• Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact Police Scotland on 101, quoting reference 2910 of 30 June 2026, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

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End Bird Shooting

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

• Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers helps us fund investigations, take on staff, and enables us to be more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, then how adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated, and the enormous numbers of eggs collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers. We’ve looked at very young chicks being ‘sexed’ and sorted, at how some will end up being macerated (or ground up alive).

Now we are posting some undercover footage taken inside a shed on a farm in northern England. It is short but - if you have any empathy for young lives at all - upsetting.

It shows a young pheasant chick. She is lying on her back at the bottom of a feeder, legs in the air, wings folded, her beak wedged in a gap she can't pull free from. By the time our undercover investigator has worked out what they are looking at, set the camera down and freed the chick, she is already dying. Within a short time, she is dead.

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How does a chick get stuck like this?

We can’t be certain of the precise sequence of events that trapped the first chick, of course, and we weren't there for the moments before she was found. But the explanation that fits the footage is a plausible one - and it is down to the device fitted to this bird’s face.

Like most farmed pheasant chicks, this one had been “bitted” - a plastic clip has been pushed through the nasal septum to hold the beak slightly open. The beak can no longer close fully enough to grip and pull feathers from another bird. Feather pecking is linked to stress and the conditions birds are kept in, and bitting - as we detailed in an earlier post - is now standard practice on farms that breed birds for the gun in packed and almost bare sheds.

What the bit does, beyond restricting the beak, is change its shape. A bitted beak isn’t a smooth taper anymore - it has a clip sitting across it, wider and bulkier than bare keratin.

Our reading of the footage is that the chick pushed her beak into a narrow gap in the feeder, probably reaching for grain, and the bit’s edges caught against the edges of gap as she tried to pull her beak back out. It’s the same basic principle as a barbed hook or a cable tie: easy to push in, near-impossible to pull back the way it came.

Once stuck, panic likely set in. Any trapped bird - suddenly, as they would see it, extremely vulnerable to predation - would react in the same way. Thrashing and twisting would have flipped the small, light bird onto her back, jamming the bit we can see in the post-release screenshots even more firmly. The more she struggled, the weaker she would have become.

Though the team rescued her, we believe she died from stress and exhaustion. She gave everything she could and didn’t have the strength to keep going.

We’ve written before, in “Dead Week”, about exhausted and stressed adult birds who have nothing left, who reach a point where they quietly shut down. This feels like the same thing, in miniature, in a small bird that had barely had the chance to grow feathers.

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What the law actually allows for

While we all want justice, the law cuts against a tidy ending here.

Farmed pheasant chicks, while still in the shed and under human control, are “protected animals” under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. Section 4 makes it an offence to cause a protected animal unnecessary suffering - but only where the person responsible knew, or reasonably ought to have known, that their act or failure to act would cause it. Section 9 creates a separate duty of care, requiring anyone responsible for an animal to take reasonable steps to meet its welfare needs to the standard of good practice.

On paper, a chick trapped, panicking, and dying in a feeder could fall under one or both sections. In practice, we think a prosecution over this specific chick would struggle before it started: we don’t know how long she was trapped before the investigative team found her, or whether staff had checked that feeder recently. Without a timeline, it’s very hard to show anyone knew, or ought to have known, this particular chick was suffering (which is what Section 4 requires) and equally hard to say what “reasonable steps” were skipped (which is what Section 9 requires).

That’s a weakness in the law, not a defence of the industry. It’s the ordinary, structural difficulty of applying an individual-fault law to an operation that rears and houses animals by the hundred thousand, where no one is watching any single bird closely enough to know the moment they start to suffer.

It’s also worth asking at this point whether this was less a freak accident than something close to inevitable.

We don’t know whether this feeder is a standard model used across the industry, whether other chicks have become stuck in the same way, or whether this particular bird was simply smaller than most - but if a gap exists that a small head can fit through while a bitted beak cannot pull back out of, this becomes less about one unlucky bird and more about equipment rolled out across thousands of sheds without much apparent thought for whether it fits the animals using it.

That’s a hazard built into a system, not created by any single person’s neglect on the day. It’s a different kind of gap in the Animal Welfare Act to the one discussed above, but yet again the law was written to find individual fault, not to ask whether the feeder itself should ever have been in that shed.

A death that will not be missed?

This one chick's death will not matter to the farm. She will not be mourned. On a production line churning out hundreds of thousands of birds a year, a dead chick is not a tragedy; it's a rounding error. Thrown in the bin, her cost will be absorbed into the price of every bird that survives.

But her death had a profound impact - on the team who found her, tried to save her, but couldn’t.

Undercover investigation work asks people to witness exactly this kind of moment - a dying chick, a stuck and panicking animal - but to keep filming, keep documenting, keep to the plan, because that is the only way this evidence reaches anyone.

It would be easy to assume that hardens a person, or that they stop feeling. That is simply not true. The discipline of staying composed in front of suffering they cannot immediately fix is one of the hardest parts of the job, not the easiest. It costs them something every time.

This piece - every article in this series - exists because they were prepared to pay that cost, because they genuinely care about every small bird in a way that people connected to this industry never will.

• Video and images recorded by an undercover investigative team in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers helps us fund investigations, take on staff, and enables us to be more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, then how adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated, and the enormous numbers of eggs collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers.

Recently we looked at very young chicks being ‘sexed’ and sorted. But we didn’t explain why and what happens to the birds the industry doesn’t want…

Sorting

Sorting takes place when chicks are very young, and it has two functions on a farm where birds are being bred for the gun. The first is sexing - ie sorting males from females. The second is checking for weak or unhealthy birds.

A breeding operation exists to produce eggs - and those eggs are laid only by females. A male is needed to fertilise them, but because farms typically rotate one male pheasant among eight females, only a small number are ever needed. The rest are, in the industry's own accounting, surplus. While it depends on the individual farm’s requirements that year (and how Avian Flu has impacted imports of chicks from continental hatcheries), as many as half of every hatch on a so-called ‘game farm’ may be killed within hours of being born. Not for any reason connected to their health. They are killed because they are male, and a male pheasant will never lay an egg.

‘Unhealthy birds’ - ie birds that because of deformity or ill-health will not survive the rigours of egg production without costly intervention - won’t add to the farm’s bottom line so will be disposed of too. They won’t be treated, cared for, rehabilitated, or set carefully aside for something else - to use the words of one of the senior workers talking in the undercover footage we’ve posted below, they will be put “straight in the bin”.

The method of disposal

The question the industry would rather we didn’t ask: what happens to the chicks the farm doesn’t want?

The typical method of ‘disposal’ is maceration. The chicks are dropped from trays, usually fully conscious and often with piles of other ‘waste’ like eggshells, into a high-speed mechanical shredder. They are literally ground up alive.

We are saying ‘usually’ because undercover footage from one farm the investigative team visited suggested that it may leave the chicks to die in the trays after sorting: every chick thrown into the macerator was (as in the screenshot below) already dead. This practice was different from what was observed at other farms, but as we can’t be certain this is a regular practice, we are not naming the farm at this point.

Typically, the shooting industry likes to disguise the actions they know the public will be incensed by with softer words: ‘processing’, ‘dispatch’, ‘culling’, and the like.

But strip away the euphemisms and what remains is a machine being used to kill live animals at industrial speed within days of hatching, simply because those animals were worthless to the business that bred them.

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The law

Maceration might sound like some sort of fringe practice dreamt up by rogue operators, or a historical anomaly. Far from it. It is current, and it is written into UK law.

The Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations 2015 (WATOK 2015) - which sounds like so much of the oxymoronic legislation that benefits the shooting industry - explicitly permits maceration, gas killing, or cervical dislocation as lawful ways to kill chicks under 72 hours old. In typically cold, remote words, it states that “The killing of surplus chicks…in hatchery waste must be as rapid as possible.”

It’s also worth knowing that under UK law (and this advice was last updated in March 2026), a staff member working on a farm does not need a WATOK licence “to kill surplus chicks or embryos in hatchery waste” - in other words, the specific licences required to carry out animal slaughter under WATOK 2015 are not required if you’re a temporary or casual worker being employed on a ‘game farm’ for the summer and part of your role is going to be dumping live chicks into a machine that grinds them up. In-house training is all you need…

At this point, it’s a fair question to ask how on earth a ‘game farm’ trains someone to work on the macerator anyway. Practice? Repetition? Just pick the person who doesn’t mind throwing helpless birds into a meat grinder? There really is no answer that reflects well on the industry or the people involved.

‘Humane’ does a lot of heavy lifting

Shooting industry bodies will tell you maceration is ‘humane’ - ie ‘showing kindness, care, and sympathy toward people or animals’. Their loose interpretation of ‘humane’ totally ignores the fear and stress of the conveyor belt and the sorting facility, but it is used because (the industry will tell you) death is instantaneous.

That claim rests entirely on the operator being properly trained, and the system functioning as intended, every time, on every bird, without exception.

That’s the sort of ‘quality assurance guarantee’ that industrial-scale processing rarely earns. It is the sort of ‘quality assurance guarantee’ that unlawfully leaves a chick to die in a trailer full of broken eggshells, after all.

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The pattern, again

Forget any noble concepts like ‘humane’ or ‘welfare’. This industry is not organised around the wellbeing of the birds it breeds. It is organised around egg output. Killing day-old chicks is where that logic leads. Maceration is a cost calculation, made by an industry whose business model depends on maximising eggs and minimising anything that doesn’t produce them.

It is simply cheaper to destroy ‘unwanted’ chicks than integrate them into the system.

The truth is that the chicks going into the macerator were never seen as animals to be cared for. They were a byproduct to be disposed of by whoever is at hand on the day.

Living waste to be put ‘straight in the bin’…

• Video and images recorded by an undercover investigative team in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Recently we showed you footage of pheasant chicks tipped bodily out of trays onto a shed floor, scrambling over one another before they’d even found their legs. Readers might reasonably have hoped that was as bad as it gets in the first weeks of a gamebird’s life. It isn’t.

On another farm, investigators filmed young pheasants, and what the camera caught this time was quieter than a tray of chicks hitting sawdust, but no less telling. Every single young pheasant in shot - dozens of them, huddled under a heat lamp, picking through wood shavings, pressing into corners away from the light - had been fitted with a ‘bit’.

Look closely at the birds in these stills and you can see it: a small pale wedge of plastic lodged in the nares. It’s the kind of detail you could miss on a bird this young and this fluffed-up., but it is there. And it was put there very deliberately, to cure a ‘problem’ the shooting industry itself creates: feather pecking…

Now imagine being that chick

Before a bit goes in, a bird has to be caught. Every one of the young birds in this footage - every single one - was picked up out of a scrum of shed-mates, gripped in a human hand, and had something forced between its beak and its face. When they are six to seven weeks old they will be rounded up again, held down, and the bits pulled out.

Chicks have an in-built, evolved fear of something tall, upright and looming, closing in from above. It’s the same instinct that makes a chick freeze under a hawk-shaped silhouette. To a bird only a few weeks removed from the egg, a gloved hand descending out of the gloom of a shed is not so different from a predator. Yet it is caught, restrained, and has a foreign object fitted to a highly sensitive part of its body - and this happens not in an emergency, but as a matter of course because that’s what the system requires to keep the mortality figures down.

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What a bit actually does

Unlike a beak guard, which clips over the top of the beak, a bit is slid into the nostrils and sits across the beak itself, holding it very slightly open so it can never fully close. It is fitted by hand using a plastic ‘bit fitter’.

A bit doesn’t stop a bird pecking. It stops a peck from landing. It wedges the beak into a permanently slightly-open position so the bird can no longer close its beak tightly enough to grip and pull out another bird’s feathers.

The industry’s own research body, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), is candid about why this is considered necessary: its own studies found that flocks left unbitted suffered higher mortality because of increased feather pecking, and describe feather pecking outright as a welfare problem in flocks of birds being raised to be shot.

Read that again. The industry’s own scientists are telling us that the birds it rears are so prone to attacking each other that farms are having to fit bits on welfare grounds.

In the GWCT’s own trial that happened at five of seven farms tested. That isn’t a footnote. That’s a confession, dressed up as a research summary.

Because pheasants are not born vicious. In the wild, a hen pheasant raises a small brood in open cover with space to range, forage and simply get away from each other when they want to. What the investigative team filmed was the opposite of that: hundreds of chicks crammed under a few heaters in a shed with no natural light, nowhere further than a few feet to retreat to, competing for the same feeders, the same warm spot, the same patch of floor.

Feather pecking in birds bred for the gun is NOT a quirk of pheasant temperament just waiting to be managed with a piece of plastic. It’s a symptom. When young birds are stressed or lack proper outlets, normal pecking behaviour turns destructive.

It is what overcrowded, understimulated, thoroughly stressed young birds do to each other, and the industry’s answer isn’t to fix the conditions causing it - it’s to physically stop the birds from being able to express the behaviour those conditions are producing.

Even the GWCT concedes that pen ‘enrichment’ has had only limited success at preventing it - because enrichment doesn’t fix overcrowding. Only space does. And space costs money. It’s the same pattern we found with breeding cages in ‘Whatever the industry decides it means‘ - enrichment defined narrowly enough to tick a box without addressing the actual problem: not enough space.

The Code of Practice

Fitting bits is lawful, but read Defra’s own Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes, and Clause 5.1 says devices like bits, spectacles and hoods should “not be considered as routine” and that keepers should “work towards the ideal of management systems” that don’t need them at all.

Yet “as routine” is exactly what bitting has become. Not the exception reached for when a flock turns aggressive - it’s the default, endorsed by the industry itself, and applied automatically to every chick, because it is cheaper than giving them room to be pheasants.

Just below that Clause 5.3 says that the use of bits in young pheasants for short periods “to prevent injurious behaviour” should be justified and closely monitored on each premise.

That is not what the cameras - which were filming continuously - captured. An occasional visit and a quick glance is not ‘closely monitored’ by any stretch of the imagination.

A shortcut, not a solution

This isn’t the only time these birds might be handled and fitted with a ‘management device’. It will happen to birds kept back for egg laying when they are older and crammed into raised cages.

In “Pinned Down and Terrified” we showed you breeding birds being fitted with beak guards and spectacles - devices clipped to the top of the beak - and described exactly what fitting one does to a bird held down on a table: the panting, the fixed stare, the visible fluttering of the throat. That footage still stands. This is a different device, filmed on a different farm entirely, on a different day - but it tells us the same underlying story:

• Overcrowd the birds, then fit a device to manage the fallout.

• Rear them at a density that guarantees stress, then blame ‘pecking behaviour’ on the bird as though it were an unfortunate quirk of the species rather than a predictable consequence of how they’re being kept.

Again, a ‘bit’ is not proof that pheasants are naturally vicious. It is proof, though, that this industry has yet again found it cheaper to fix the bird rather than to fix the conditions they are kept in. And yet again, it has chosen to ignore the Code of Practice that it helped to put together: the so-called ‘Code’ was drafted after extensive consultation with the Game Farmers Association.

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Incidentally, when asked in a 2010 consultation on the Code, whether bitting younger pheasants should continue when “justified, monitored and fitted on an enterprise-by-enterprise basis,” the GWCT’s answer was yes - but added that “their use should always be kept under review.”

Sixteen years on, that review appears not to have happened. What we filmed wasn’t monitored, justified case-by-case use. It was every bird fitted - as standard.

There is little point naming this farm, because it is doing what many others do. This is an industry-wide issue.

But then this is an industry that treats live animals as units before selling them off to be shot. That mouths platitudes about ‘not tolerating wildlife crime’ while appearing to look the other way when birds of prey ‘disappear’. That in the midst of climate and biodiversity crises is broadly still behaving as it did a century ago.

The Code is NOT law

As a final thought, the government itself writes in the Preface to its November 2023 updated Code of Practice page that “Failure to comply with a provision of this Code shall not of itself render you liable to proceedings of any kind”. In other words, welfare codes are not law.

It's worth sitting with that. It's true, technically. But look at what "not law" has been made to mean in practice, on this farm as on the others in this series of articles.

• Not a floor beneath which no keeper should fall, but a ceiling nobody has to reach.

• Not routine has become routine.

• Kept under review has become never reviewed.

• A Code drafted with the industry's own input has become a document the industry treats as optional the moment it costs money to follow.

Non-law was never supposed to mean law-free. But it’s precisely inside this legal hole where this farm, and all the ones we’ve written about, have chosen to set up camp.

But then, this is the shooting industry: what exactly did politicians think was going to happen…

• Photographs taken by undercover investigators in 2025

• Code of practice for the welfare of gamebirds reared for sporting purposes Clause 5.1 “The use of management devices or practices that do not allow birds to fully express their range of normal behaviours should not be considered as routine and keepers should work towards the ideal of management systems that do not require these devices. Such devices and practices include mutilations such as beak trimming, procedures to prevent or limit flight such as brailing (placing a band on a wing to prevent extension of the wing), trimming of non-sensitive flight feathers and the use of bits, spectacles and hoods to prevent feather pecking, egg eating or aggression. Their use should be justified on a flock by flock basis and regularly reviewed in the flock health and welfare plan. Any device that is designed to pierce the nasal septum is illegal.”

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

A few weeks ago we published footage from inside the pheasant hatchery, showing workers ‘sorting’ very young chicks and dropping them onto a moving conveyor belt - treated, as we put it, as “just one more item to be sorted, moved, processed.”

Readers probably hoped that was the worst of it. It wasn’t. What follows is an account of what happens to chicks once they are ‘sold on’ to another farm, and it’s just as heartbreaking…

The investigations team placed a camera inside a rearing facility on a different farm and left it for two days. It was pointed at what amounted to a ‘ring’ of sawdust and heat lamps inside a dark shed, and it clearly captured the moment when chicks are ‘introduced’ to their new home…

A worker carries plastic rearing trays into the shed, walks into the centre of the ‘ring’, and simply tips the tray, upside down, letting dozens of chicks fall from a height onto the sawdust below. They land in a pile, scrambling over one another, wings flapping uselessly, before slowly finding their feet and scattering across the floor in search of somewhere - anywhere - safe.

Become a Game Changer

He repeats this several times. After a few minutes, presumably because the floor of the shed is now so littered with chicks frantically running around and he wants to avoid squashing the ‘profits’ with his metaphorical size twelve boots, the worker simply stands by the door and scoops up handfuls of chicks from a tray which he tosses away like he’s bailing water from a boat.

This is, to use a metaphor the industry might recognise, decanting ‘stock’ from a delivery crate as quickly as possible. Everything happens (as it always seems to happen on farms like these) at speed, almost casually, the way you might tip a crate of potatoes onto a shop floor.

In a later clip, the camera filmed the same worker picking up the corpses of chicks that hadn’t survived the fall or the impact of bodies landing on them…

It might be fine to handle vegetables like this. It’s not okay to handle fragile, very young sentient chicks like this under any circumstances…

What the industry itself says should happen

We’re deliberately publishing this just after the hatchery footage. Different farms, different workers, separate visits - but the same underlying story.

The shooting industry will dismiss a single clip as one bad moment, caught on one bad day, by one careless individual. The ‘rotten apple’ defence gets harder to sustain when the mishandling appears to be routine, recorded across farm after farm.

As a reminder, let us state once again what the industry’s own rulebook actually requires.

The rearing of birds for the gun in England is governed by the Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes, issued by Defra under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. It applies to every bird bred and reared for release to be shot, from the moment they hatch until they leave the release pen. It covers exactly the kind of handling shown in this clip.

Clause 3.1 of the Code states plainly that birds “should not be handled more than is strictly necessary,” because as non-domesticated species they “may be more prone to stress than domesticated farmed poultry,” and that “where handling proves necessary this should be done in an appropriate manner.”

These aren’t throwaway lines. They exist because Defra, in consultation with the shooting industry itself, recognised that rearing happens at a pace where corners get cut and animals get hurt - and wrote a rule specifically to stop that happening.

Become a Game Changer

A day-old pheasant chick, weighing perhaps 30 to 40 grams, with bones that haven’t hardened and legs not yet reliably load-bearing, is about as vulnerable to a fall as an animal gets. Tipping dozens of them out of a tray from height on top of each other is not “handling in an appropriate manner” by any reading of that phrase. It’s the opposite of what the Code says should happen - and it’s happening here on camera, not as a rumour or an allegation, but as recorded fact.

A pattern, not an anomaly

As we say above, the industry’s response to this will be the same as always: this is one bad worker, at one farm, on one day - not representative, not systemic, nothing to see here.

But look at what we’ve actually published so far. Adult breeding birds mishandled and chicks manhandled along a mechanical sorting line on one farm. Eggs harvested at industrial scale and dumped unlawfully on another. And now chicks tipped bodily out of trays on a third farm entirely, filmed on a completely separate visit.

Our investigative team are highly skilled, but they didn’t know in advance what they might film. Nobody handed them a shortlist of “bad farms.” If potential breaches of the industry’s own Code were rare, freak events - isolated to a handful of careless individuals - then finding them again and again, at farm after farm, on ordinary working days, would be a statistical near-impossibility.

Recording this footage isn’t down to chance - and we have plenty more to reveal yet…

It’s a system-wide issue

This footage, this casual lack of care, isn't being captured because our cameras have been extraordinarily lucky in where they ended up. It’s because this is what the system produces, routinely, when nobody expects to be watched.

That’s the point we keep coming back to, because it’s the one that actually matters: this investigation is not about ‘catching’ individual workers. It’s about a system. It’s what an industry does to the animals passing through it when those animals exist, from day one, only as ‘stock’ - units to be hatched, sorted, tipped, released and ultimately shot for entertainment.

Millions of pheasant chicks go through hatcheries and rearing sheds like these every year. This will be how a great many of them start their short lives. The industry might insist that footage like this is unrepresentative, but it’s worth asking how the system it represents keeps generating more of it, farm after farm, whenever anyone happens to be filming.

If this wasn’t on a so-called ‘game farm’

As a final thought, just imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if a rescue centre or a member of the public were filmed treating just one vulnerable chick like this. All hell would break loose. Social media would demand action. But birds bred for the gun? Outside of a few of us trying to raise awareness, there will be deflection, denial, dismissal. A collective shrug. ‘Yeah, well, it’s pheasants; that’s just what happens…’

Even MPs from all sides of the House seem willing to stand alongside this appalling industry, listening to its economic arguments while apparently trusting it to stick to ‘guidelines’ that are tossed aside - like day-old chicks - whenever it thinks no one is watching.

We have said it many times, but this is an industry that can’t simply be nudged into caring with a few polite conversations and ‘gentlemen’s agreements’. It is far too big, far too arrogant, and its practices run far too deep. If we genuinely care about animals then the only response is that it must be shut down. For good.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. But we are only just getting started.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, though, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Every August, a familiar, back-slapping, self-congratulatory ritual plays out in Britain’s food pages. The driven grouse shooting season begins, and within days a handful of chefs start telling journalists which grouse they will and won’t put on the menu.

This one is “responsibly sourced”, they claim. That one comes from an estate with “good practice.”

Really?

Every grouse on a restaurant plate has been produced by intensively managing an entire upland landscape in order to maximise a so-called ‘surplus’ available for guns to shoot. Heather is burned to force the young growth grouse prefer. Peatland is drained. And anything that might eat a grouse chick or its eggs — foxes, stoats, weasels — is trapped and killed in industrial quantities, while the illegal persecution of birds of prey on and around driven grouse moors is, as repeated documentation proves, endemic to the ‘sport’.

Business Model

This is not ‘rotten apples’ or an anomaly or some sort of regrettable side effect. It is the business model.

When a chef draws a line between one moor and another, they are not opting out of that system. They are choosing a single supplier from within it and asking to be congratulated for the choice. It’s the sourcing equivalent of a chef turning down bluefin tuna from one boat while ordering it from the boat next door because its livery is prettier. The tuna is still endangered. The moor is still burned. The stoats are still dead in the traps. There are still far fewer Hen Harriers than there should be.

The entire point of a grouse moor is to concentrate as many birds as possible within the range of the guns, and suppress everything in the ecosystem that competes with them. Exactly which part of this merits a ‘responsibly sourced’ label?

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Smaller and Fewer

This year the cherry-picking looks even more indefensible. Yet another ‘poor season’ and smaller-than-usual birds - which shoots themselves have acknowledged is the result of poor chick nutrition, parasite burdens like ticks and worms, and harsh moorland weather that limited the availability of young heather - appears now to be framed as though scarcity or poor health were a virtue rather than a warning of just how unsustainable the driven grouse shooting industry really is.

Richard Corrigan, a Mayfair chef who appears to be regularly approached for comment as he has spoken out against “large-scale ‘factory’ grouse shooting operations”, was quoted in a 12 August article in The Guardian by Helena Horton, for example, openly admitting that the birds would be “smaller and fewer” than usual but that “is fine and it is a treat”.

‘Hot Dinners’, apparently London's largest independent dining-out publication and website, falls into the same hole. Admitting that “it's been a challenging year” with “the heat in particular affecting habitats”, the site warns not to expect “too much on the actual day”, but still goes on to list restaurants that should be serving Red Grouse “soon”. One of those restaurants sources grouse from Bolton Abbey Estate, a huge estate in the Yorkshire Dales owned by the Duke of Devonshire. According to Who Owns England, the estate received a staggering £330,261 in farm subsidies in 2018. In March 2024 a Natural England assessment found the section of the West Nidderdale, Barden and Blubberhouses Moors SSSI covering Barden Moor — part of the Bolton Abbey Estate — in "unfavourable declining" condition.

Become a Game Changer

Meanwhile, platforms like The Staff Canteen are still - after decades of the evidence of the harm grouse shooting causes - framing the ‘Inglorious Twelfth’ (ie the start of months of killing Red Grouse) as some kind of celebration of Britain’s “only truly wild game bird” and a “cornerstone of seasonal cooking”, writing that a day (notable only for the fact that it becomes legal to shoot one of Britain and Ireland’s only endemic birds) remains one of the “most talked-about dates in the British culinary calendar”.

It seems the food industry is apparently happy talking about grouse shooting, but not to take much of an effort to actually understand what their 'seasonal treat’ really costs…

Looking the other way

If the catering industry appears to know enough to ask an estate about its “sustainability” credentials, it should also understand what driven grouse shooting requires to exist at all. Choosing to look no further than the answer it wants to hear is not diligence. It’s the same self-serving trick the clients perform when they book a day’s shooting on an estate and tell themselves that a carefully-written press release is evidence enough that all is well.

There is also something telling in which chefs get the media column inches. It’s rarely the ones who simply refuse to serve any grouse at all: it’s the ones who still keep the dish on the menu, still bank the money, while presenting a question about sourcing as proof of moral legwork.

Journalists are complicit in that framing too, treating a supplier’s postcode as a proxy for an ethical audit that nobody has actually carried out.

The result is a story that flatters everyone involved - chef, estate, diner - while changing nothing about how many raptors are found dead on grouse moors each spring, or how much peat is still burned to keep the heather at the right age for chicks.

The phrase “wilful blindness” - popularised by the Raptor Persecution UK blog to describe shooting’s paying customers looking away from what happens to Hen Harriers, Peregrines, Golden Eagles, and Short-eared owls on the moors they shoot over - comes to mind. It’s just our opinion, but frankly no one comes out of sharing a toilet with the grouse shooting industry without s**t sticking to them…

A Better Future

Become a Game Changer

What we could applaud is chefs admitting that they have been cogs used by an industry that needs taking apart, and saying something meaningful along the lines of the Scottish Greens rural affairs spokesperson Ariane Burgess MSP, who is quoted saying, “The real glorious future for Scotland’s moors would be seeing wildlife flourish on them, peatlands restored and rural jobs created through the recovery of our natural environment.”

Instead, they are trying to win points for serving up a bird found nowhere else on Earth that has been run through a system of burned peat, poisoned raptors and trapped predators so that a small number of people can shoot it for ‘sport’.

In reality, there is only shooting’s supply chain, and everyone who buys into any part of it - and that includes the chefs cosplaying concern and wanting plaudits for their supposed discernment - is complicit in what it costs to put that bird on the plate.

Any chef can wash their greens. None of them can greenwash a grouse moor - and no seasoning on earth can make this industry palatable…

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful

We are reaching a larger audience all the time, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Every 12 August, a small ritual repeats itself in British newsrooms: a journalist lazily reaches for the phrase “Glorious Twelfth” to mark the start of the driven grouse season: four months of slaughtering one of just two birds endemic to Britain and Ireland for “sport”.

But look closely at the use of that phrase today compared with a century ago, and a hypothesis worth testing emerges - that the press has moved from uncritical cheerleading, through a phase of open scepticism, and is now largely disengaging from the story altogether, leaving the shooting industry to make its own case in an increasingly defensive and frustrated tone.

The evidence, gathered across national, regional and trade titles, supports that arc.

Act One: the press as estate mouthpiece

The term “Glorious 12th” is a relic of class deference. It entered use after the Game Act 1831 fixed 12 August as the legal opening of the season, and it stuck through the Victorian railway boom, when moorlands became newly accessible to wealthy sportsmen and grouse shooting turned into a fixture of the social season.

For most of the twentieth century, national and regional papers reported the day exactly as landed estates wanted: a “glorious” social occasion, framed around aristocratic house parties, railway grouse deliveries to London restaurants, and gamekeepers’ forecasts of a bumper “bag”.

The framing was celebratory, unquestioning. The press essentially reprinted the industry’s own vocabulary of “sport” and “tradition” without ever challenging it.

Act Two: the caveat creeps in

By the early 2000s, the unqualified cheer starts to acquire footnotes. These were practical, weather- or disease-driven caveats rather than ethical challenges, but they mark the first cracks in a previously unbroken PR surface.

Environmental and welfare framing followed. Scotland’s Herald has repeated claims that the date is now “more often than not... preceded by the word, ‘controversial’”, pointing to what one campaigner called a “circle of destruction“ around moor management. In 2022 the Herald ran a feature which openly asked whether the start of grouse shooting was “A grand rural tradition or an outdated outrage.”

In 2024 Scotland’s Press and Journal again posed the question, “Is grouse shooting still a celebrated tradition?”

Even inside supposedly sympathetic titles, dissent surfaced. That perhaps reached its apex in 2023, when, in a piece in which he blamed gamekeepers for poisoning a Red Kite, the late Rod Liddle used his Sunday Times column to call the industry’s existence “an absurdity”, a sentence that would have been unthinkable in a right-leaning broadsheet a generation earlier.

Become a Game Changer

Online coverage of raptor persecution - the illegal killing of Hen Harriers, Golden Eagles and other birds of prey on or near grouse moors - has been central to this shift. Regional titles that once simply announced the shoot now routinely note that Scottish ministers cited “ongoing problems with illegal raptor persecution” when justifying a grouse moor licensing scheme, and mainstream reporting on satellite-tagged eagles that vanish over shooting estates has become a near-annual news beat in its own right.

After yet another ‘hottest summer on record’ and wildfires raging, it’s not difficult to predict that the environmental cost of a niche hobby that impacts important carbon stores and air quality levels will lead future headlines.

Act Three: disengagement

What’s striking about the last five years’ coverage is less outright hostility than a kind of editorial shrug.

Most “reporting” is now syndicated wire copy - near-identical short pieces distributed across dozens of regional outlets (Shropshire Star, the Dumbarton Reporter, ITV regional sites) carrying the same PA-agency paragraphs almost verbatim.

The celebratory long-read - the country-house feature, the grouse-on-the-9am-train story - has largely been relegated to lifestyle and luxury titles rather than being featured on the news pages of the Times, Mail or Telegraph. Even the Telegraph, still the most sympathetic of the nationals, now frames the day defensively: in 2024 it reported a “not-so-glorious Twelfth“ amid cancelled shoots and empty hotels.

By 2025 the Scotsman was running a feature asking outright whether it was “time to end the Scottish grouse shooting season“.

Meanwhile, hunt-saboteur “weeks of action” and Extinction Rebellion moor protests now get their own separate news cycle, often crowding out any celebratory framing entirely.

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Campaigners have coined a counter-vocabulary. The term ‘Inglorious 12th’, for example, was first used by John Vidal in a Guardian article in 1999, and popularised by ecologist and blogger Dr Mark Avery around 2014. It has since become the standard rallying cry across wildlife and animal-welfare campaigns, hunt-sab networks and Substack commentary - Protect the Wild and End Bird Shooting write only of the “Inglorious 12th”.

The phrase has so far stayed almost entirely outside the national press’s own vocabulary, though. Reporters may quote campaigners using it, but newsroom headlines still default to “Glorious Twelfth”, even in stories that are otherwise sceptical or hostile in content. Campaigners like ourselves will be working to tip “Inglorious Twelfth” from a rallying cry into the term the mainstream press itself reaches for and is comfiortable using.

The industry press: from boasting to bargaining

Where the most telling shift appears to be taking place is inside shooting’s own trade and advocacy output.

Older material extolled the day in almost devotional, salivatory terms - “glorious”, “iconic”, the “New Year’s Day of hunting”. Compare that with recent industry communications, which read more like a legal brief than a celebration.

BASC’s 2025 messaging was framed as a “season of recovery, not reward” rather than triumph. The Moorland Association’s public case now leads not with romance but with (disputed) arithmetic - grouse shooting is “worth £67.7 million a year to England’s economy“ and supports “over 1,500... jobs” - while Scottish Land and Estates claims that public “objections are quite often based on misunderstandings“, a defensive line that suggests the public is largely hostile or indifferent only because it needs re-educating.

Groups such as the North Yorkshire Moors Moorland Organisation were founded explicitly, in their own words, because keepers felt their “livelihoods... were being threatened... by misinformation and the possibility of a ban”, and set out to “promote the good side of moorland management before it gets to that point” - a defensive mission statement that would have been unimaginable as an industry rallying cry fifty years ago (and one we have countered with articles like ‘The Myth of Moorland Management’).

The royal wild card

One factor that has propped up the old framing more than almost any other is the continued, visible participation of the royal family. Grouse shooting at Balmoral has long been “one of the highlights of the royals’ calendar”, and King Charles, as Prince of Wales, shot there regularly for decades. That royal presence has given the industry something no amount of industry statistics can buy: a guaranteed, prestige news hook that keeps “Glorious Twelfth” in circulation regardless of the argument’s merits.

It is also the point at which the industry’s defensive posture and the family’s own public identity sit most awkwardly together.

Prince William has built a public profile around conservation - warning that species like elephants and rhinos could be lost within a generation, and founding the Earthshot Prize to reward environmental solutions - while continuing a family tradition of killing wild birds at Balmoral, a pursuit inseparable from muirburn, snaring and, on some estates, illegal raptor persecution.

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Animal welfare campaigners made exactly that point when William took a young Prince George to watch a shoot near Balmoral in 2020, with campiagners arguing it sat uneasily with “a royal family that is trying to promote itself as progressive and compassionate”. Some conservationists have gone further, urging the family to rewild Balmoral’s moorland rather than manage it for driven shoots at all.

Should a future king choose to step back from grouse shooting, it would remove one of the last remaining reasons for the mainstream press to treat 12 August as an automatic news date rather than an optional one.

Royal participation is, in that sense, one of the last load-bearing walls left in the discredited advertising of the “Glorious Twelfth”: take it away, and what coverage remains would have even less support to keep it propped up.

Conclusion: the hypothesis largely holds

The pattern is not a straight line. Right-leaning titles like the Telegraph still run celebratory content in some years, and trade outlets continue to promote the day to their own readership. It is 12 August 2026 as this is written, and the day is being covered - but nervously and in no way comprehensively.

The Countryside Alliance published a piece on 6 August headlined “A twelfth of August that is once again glorious?” - note the question mark, a hedge that would once have been unthinkable in industry copy. ShootingUK’s season preview is more relieved than triumphant, reporting that 2026 looks like “the best for three years” after two seasons “wrecked by weather and heather beetle”. That is the sound of an industry grateful simply to be out killing wildlife at all, not one confidently declaring a “glorious” day.

Meanwhile, on the day itself and at the time of writing, an online search suggests that none of the major national mastheads - the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Mail, Herald or Scotsman - have run a distinct, freshly reported news piece marking the Twelfth, as opposed to recycled explainer content or wire-agency copy from previous years still circulating online.

That absence is not proof of anything on its own - coverage can simply lag a live search index by hours, and outlets may yet publish later in the day - but it is worth flagging as a live data point for the pattern the rest of this article sets out to establish: a century-long journey from unquestioning support, through open scepticism, to something closer to indifference in the mainstream press, alongside a shooting industry whose own language has curdled from boast into defence.

The future

The grouse shooting industry no longer gets to simply declare the Twelfth ‘glorious’ and have the press repeat it; increasingly, it has to argue its case to journalists that appear not to be listening. This shift from “devotion to uninterested” marks a huge opportunity for campaigners.

A press that once needed no persuading to run the industry’s own language does not simply drift away; it walks away because the old story has stopped working - because raptor persecution, wildfire risk and biodiversity loss have made nonsense about “tradition” a hard sell, and because a new, less deferential generation of journalists and editors no longer treat a landed estate’s press release as “news”.

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End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.

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Every August, as the “Glorious Twelfth” is toasted in shooting lodges across the uplands, a different reality unfolds on the moors: lines of guns waiting for beaters to drive terrified Red Grouse into the air, so that clients can shoot as many as possible before lunch.

There is nothing glorious about it. It is time we all used the term popularised by Mark Avery over a decade ago - the ‘Inglorious Twelfth‘.

Let’s explain why…

Red Grouse are an endemic species

Red Grouse are one of only two bird species endemic to Britain and Ireland. They are found nowhere else on Earth. A bird found here and nowhere else is treated not as a national treasure but as a live target, bred in artificially inflated numbers purely so that paying clients can blast them out of the sky.

Hundreds of thousands of Red Grouse are shot dead every year to service a pastime that most of the country never asked for and increasingly wants to see the back of.

That, alone, should give any society that claims to value its wildlife pause, but grouse shooting does not only impact Red Grouse. It requires an entire, brutal infrastructure to keep grouse numbers artificially high enough for a day’s “sport” to be worthwhile - and that infrastructure is where the real cost is paid, by species that have nothing to do with the guns at all.

Raptor persecution and predator ‘control’

Birds of prey are the most obvious casualties. Hen Harriers, Golden Eagles and other raptors prey on grouse, so on many estates they are illegally trapped, poisoned or shot to protect the “stock.”

Satellite-tagged birds vanish over grouse moors with grim regularity. A 2025 RSPB report – titled unambiguously Hen Harriers in the firing line – stated that record numbers of Hen Harriers were illegally killed or went missing in suspicious circumstances over the past five years, and that the majority of the 102 incidents occurred on or near grouse moors. It also said that the average life expectancy of a young Hen Harrier in the UK is now just 121 days.

A report by the Cairngorms National Park published in 2025 stated that the estimated number of Peregrine pairs within the National Park had declined by 56% since 2002, and laid the blame on - amongst other things - “upland management factors”, ie grouse shooting.

This is despite legal protection for birds of prey stretching back over seventy years. The problem isn’t a gap in the law. It’s that gamekeepers keep breaking it, on land that is vast, private and almost impossible to police: a majority of individuals convicted of raptor persecution are connected to the shooting industry, with over half actively employed as gamekeepers at the time.

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Raptors aren’t the only targets, of course. Snares and Fenn traps are set across the uplands in their thousands to kill foxes, stoats, weasels and corvids - native predators that have lived on these moors since the last Ice Age. These wild animals are trapped and killed in huge numbers, not because they threaten anyone, but because they might eat a grouse chick before a client gets the chance to shoot the adult.

An entire native ecosystem is being suppressed to ‘protect’ one species for slaughter by so-called ‘sportsmen’.

Moorland burning

Muirburn is the deliberate burning of heather moorland to create the tender new shoots grouse feed on. Much of this burning takes place on peatland - Britain’s largest terrestrial carbon store, built up over thousands of years.

A 2026 study by the RSPB and the University of Leeds found that burning on moorland in the UK, largely carried out to support “recreational shooting”, led to almost one in five people in affected areas being exposed to unsafe levels of pollution. The scientists said that on days burning took place “millions of people” were exposed to increased pollution with PM2.5 concentrations exceeding World Health Organisation air quality guidelines.

As well as creating air pollution, burning dries out and degrades peat, releasing stored carbon, and damages the moor’s ability to hold water, increasing flood risk downstream.

Grouse moor managers will point to sustainable-burning guidelines, but guidelines mean little when enforcement is as weak as it is for raptor persecution, and vast stretches of upland Britain already lie parched and degraded as a result of climate change. Just when we should be protecting peatland as a climate solution, continuing to burn moorland purely so more birds can be shot is not just cruel; it is indefensible.

A complicit clientele

None of this happens without the client. Every part of grouse shooting’s savage machinery is switched on for one reason: because someone is willing to pay to walk onto a moor and pull a trigger. Take away the client, and the whole apparatus has no reason to exist.

That is the plain arithmetic of it. Nobody is forced to book a day’s shooting. It is a choice, made for pleasure, by people who could not care less what it costs everyone else - the eagles, the harriers, the burned peat, the pollution drifting into the towns below the moor. It is no different to getting behind the wheel after a bottle of wine: perfectly aware, entirely avoidable, and utterly indifferent to who pays the price.

The industry’s blood is on their hands.

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No ‘licencing lifeline’

Organisations like Protect the Wild, through its End Bird Shooting campaign, reject the idea that licensing grouse moors - as introduced in Scotland under the Wildlife Management and Muirburn Act - is any kind of solution. We call it a “licencing lifeline” because that is exactly what it offers a dying industry.

Licensing does not stop a single grouse being shot, does not stop predator traps being set, and does not stop the burning. It simply hands an anachronistic pastime an official stamp of approval and legitimacy, and makes it harder, not easier, to ban outright.

If anyone remains unconvinced, Scotland’s licensing system was meant to curb raptor persecution, yet within months regulators had already caved to pressure from estate owners and shrunk the land it covers. Killings have continued regardless.

Nothing ‘glorious’ about it

There is nothing remotely ‘glorious’ about August Twelfth. It’s a date which is entirely synonymous with the killing of endemic birds, the trashing of the uplands, and making as much money as possible on moorland estates owned by so-called ‘aristocrats’ or hedge funds.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Across the UK, a different kind of upland is already taking shape - moors where heather is left to grow tall instead of being burned back, where native woodland is creeping up the glens, where beavers are re-engineering rivers, and Golden Eagles are being reintroduced rather than shot out of the sky.

Rewilding projects from the Cairngorms to the Tarras Valley are showing what these landscapes can become when they're allowed to be wild again: richer in wildlife, better at storing carbon, better at holding back floodwater, and open to everyone rather than fenced off for wealthy clients each August.

That is a genuinely glorious use of the uplands - not driving terrified birds into gunfire, but letting the land breathe again.

The Inglorious Twelfth doesn't have to mark an anniversary of slaughter forever. It could just as easily mark the moment we started giving the uplands back to the wildlife that belongs there.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.

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On 7 August 2026, NatureScot announced it was restricting the use of General Licences for three years on parts of two Scottish shooting estates: Milton of Drimmie, near Blairgowrie in Perthshire, and Invermark Estate in the Angus Glens.

On the surface, this looked like decisive action against raptor persecution. Actually, it’s yet another example of a toothless sanction being dressed up as accountability - commercial bird shooting on both estates will carry on exactly as before.

Why the restrictions?

The Milton of Drimmie restriction follows the conviction of former gamekeeper Russell Mason, who was filmed by the RSPB battering a goshawk to death after it became trapped in a (lawful) crow cage on the pheasant-shooting estate in February 2024. Despite his crime passing the threshold for a custodial sentence, Mason walked away with a 200-hour Community Payback Order and an £890 fine for firearms offences.

The Invermark restriction relates to a peregrine found with shotgun injuries near grouse butts in Glen Esk in September 2024. The bird was so badly hurt it had to be put down. Nobody has been prosecuted for shooting the bird, a protected species.

For these two dead birds of prey, NatureScot has suspended three General Licences: 01 (“To kill or take certain birds for the conservation of wild birds”), 02 (“To kill or take certain birds for the prevention of serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs for livestock, crops, vegetables and fruit”), and 03 (“To kill or take or damage or destroy nest and eggs of certain birds for the preservation of public health, public safety and preventing the spread of disease”.

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The suspension covers specific parcels of land until August 2029: Cochrage Muir at Milton of Drimmie and Dalbrack Farm at Invermark.

The text ‘announcing’ the ban on NatureScot’s website clearly followed a template it keeps on hand for bans on shooting estates, as it was very similar to the wording on the ban it placed on the Raeshaw Estate earlier this year in relation to the shooting/killing of Merrick, a satellite-tagged Golden Eagle, in October 2023.

This is not a shooting ban

General Licences allow land managers to kill birds without applying for individual permission, overriding the protection provided to wild birds by The Birds Directive and Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

Removing them does not touch pheasant or grouse shooting, and does not stop an estate managing its land for that purpose. NatureScot’s own announcement admits as much, stating the restrictions are designed to protect wild birds ”while still allowing necessary land management activities to take place.”

Crucially, even the killing of native predators that General Licences normally cover hasn’t actually been banned - it’s just been made slightly more bureaucratic. Both estates remain free to apply for an individual licence covering exactly the same activity: trapping and killing crows, magpies and other so-called “pest” species (often under a faux claim of ‘conservation’).

Estates will have to keep records and file returns, and NatureScot says compliance may be spot-checked, but all the while the shooting continues, the killing of native species continues, and the estates simply fill in more paperwork to keep doing what they were doing before.

Anyone hoping this represents a shooting ban, or even a meaningful curtailment of estate activity, will be disappointed.

We’re sceptical

Supporters of General Licence restrictions often argue that even if the practical impact is limited, the reputational damage to an estate is itself a deterrent. We’re sceptical. Even commentators sympathetic to using General Licence restrictions as a tool have acknowledged they are “not perfect as an effective sanction” and are, at best, an unreliable reputational lever.

While there may be some limited press coverage, estates frequently issue robust public pushback, anyway, to protect their local standing and commercial viability (as Raeshaw Estate did in February, calling its own restriction 'wholly unjustified’).

Besides, shooting’s complicit clientele appear notoriously immune to the mountains of evidence of raptor persecution, and there is no visible evidence that estates named and restricted in this way suffer any commercial consequence: shooting parties still book in to estates, land management continues, and ownership structures remain untouched.

Given that NatureScot has had the ‘power’ to remove General Licences since 2014 but levels of raptor persecution on estates appear not to have fallen during that time, a three-year restriction on a small patch of an estate announced on a government website is evidently not the kind of consequence that changes behaviour in an industry built on law-breaking and self-policing.

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The bigger picture: raptor killing isn’t a loophole, it’s routine

And there is no doubt whatsoever that raptor persecution is routine. It has been illegal to kill a bird of prey in the UK since the Protection of Birds Act 1954, and that protection was strengthened by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981: in other words, estates have had over seventy years to stop doing this. But they haven’t.

In the RSPB’s Patterns of Persecution report released in May this year, Ian Thomson, a veteran investigations manager, is quoted saying that “almost two thirds” of recorded incidents of raptor persecution occurred on land managed for “gamebird shooting”.

Goshawks battered to death in traps, Peregrines shot out of the sky near grouse butts, Golden Eagles shot, Hen Harriers killed - these aren’t rare aberrations or incidental; they are symptoms of an industry that depends on suppressing protected raptors to inflate the number of birds available to be shot for ‘sport‘.

We need an end to bird shooting

Existing laws already outlaw raptor persecution but estates routinely ignore them - and have done so for seventy years. They have had decades of clear law but have consistently chosen concealment and denial instead: no shooting estate has ever handed over one of its own gamekeepers to the police

The answer to this long-standing and endemic crime, we are assured, is more paperwork: to bring in licences that would cover all shooting operations on estates.

We don’t agree. Bringing in more layers of licensing doesn’t address a shooting culture that is by nature destructive and harmful to wild animals. It will formalise it instead. It will hand estates a route to keep operating exactly as before, and let the shooting industry claim it is now “regulated” and therefore legitimate - precisely the outcome estates want, and precisely what raptors, grouse, pheasants, and native predators cannot afford.

Let’s be honest about this: more licences are just more laws to break, more potential ‘restrictions’ that estates will sidestep, more animals that will die ‘lawfully’ because a piece of paper says it’s ‘okay’.

This is why Protect the Wild has stated many times, through our End Bird Shooting campaign, that licencing shooting - of which General Licence restrictions are a weak forerunner - do not provide any real solution.

The only response which will actually stop raptor persecution on shooting estates is ending commercial bird shooting altogether.

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End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

We are regularly asked why more of what we film doesn’t end in a courtroom. It’s a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer.

Our footage is almost never enough on its own to prove a crime. At the same time, we are still building the End Bird Shooting movement - right now, changing minds matters as much as pursuing court cases we’re unlikely to win.

The Animal Welfare Act

First off, let’s look at the law. Section 4 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006, for example, is a broad law. It doesn’t require anyone to have meant harm. It covers negligence - an omission, a failure to notice, a failure to act - provided the person responsible ought reasonably to have known that suffering was likely.

As courts have confirmed, this is an objective test: it doesn’t need to be shown that a worker intended to cause suffering, only that a reasonably competent, reasonably humane person in their position ought to have known their conduct, or their failure to act, would cause it.

Take the footage from our last post on ‘Sorting’, reproduced again here: a chick caught and struggling on a hatchery sorting line, while the worker standing over it simply doesn’t notice - attention fixed elsewhere, on the next bird, the next tray, the next task the belt demands. That is negligent inattention, in the plainest sense of the phrase, and it is the kind of conduct Section 4 was written to capture. The same is true of chicks recorded being scooped up and dropped from a height onto the moving belt: we would maintain that is the same casual disregard for a fragile and vulnerable bird’s welfare.

Here is the problem, though. The investigator’s camera moves on. The investigator can’t stand in one place for long - they are supposed to be “working” and can’t risk drawing attention to themselves.

And while they can have a good idea what the camera is recording, there is no viewfinder to look through. Neither they nor we know how long that chick struggled for. There is constant movement and interaction. We don’t know whether the chick in the video managed to struggle free, was crushed, or was spotted and removed by someone further down the line. Whether any chicks were harmed or had bones broken by rough handling. The clips end, and with them the evidence.

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A prosecution needs facts that satisfy a court, and a few seconds of an animal in distress with no resolution on camera rarely meets that standard.

The suffering may be real. The negligence may be real. Proving either to the standard a court wants is another matter entirely.

This is not a flaw in our evidence-gathering. It’s the reality of undercover work and how high the bar is set in bringing a prosecution.

What the footage does show

What footage like this does show, though, is something a criminal charge was never going to capture in the first place: the physical set-up and pace of an industry-standard sorting system, which sits uneasily beside the very code of practice the industry says it follows - a code that requires chicks to be handled with care, and that manual handling be kept to an absolute minimum.

Our footage covered a short window, but it is a truthful report of the gap between a published standard of ‘welfare’ and the routine way fragile, day-old birds passing along a conveyor belt are sorted and treated: as “units,” as product rather than individuals.

Why we still film, and still publish

We understand the frustration. Supporters want to see farms shut down, staff charged, something that looks like justice. So do we, and we won’t stop asking whether a prosecution is possible every time we review new footage.

But we’d rather be honest about the limits of what a short clip, however disturbing, can prove in a courtroom than pretend (to supporters and to ourselves) that every clip is proof enough on its own.

The value of what we’re building isn’t any single clip - it’s the volume and consistency of what we’re documenting across farm after farm, month after month, until the pattern itself becomes impossible for regulators, the media and the public to keep ignoring.

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Why this still adds up to something

It’s worth remembering that a small, disparate campaign group with no litigation department can still change the prevailing culture and change the law. Fox hunting is proof of that. It started as a minority fight, was dismissed for decades as unwinnable, but a sustained campaign of exposure, argument and public pressure turned it into the Hunting Act 2004.

Taking on fox hunting wasn’t about trying to turn each chase as a criminal case. It was about challenging the concept of ‘tradition’, showing the reality of ripping animals apart, making the moral and ethical case over time. It was about making fox hunting itself indefensible.

We saw the same pattern play out this month with the Guga Hunt and the campaign brilliantly waged by our Protect the Wild colleagues. It was a shorter campaign than fox hunting of course, built around social media and very different levels of public sympathy for animals than the first hunt saboteurs had to deal with, but the strategy was much the same. Point out the absurdity of calling the killing of young seabirds an important tradition, detail the harm caused to wildlife, and challenge why something so destructive should be sanctioned by a public body whose reason for existing is working “to improve our natural environment in Scotland and inspire everyone to care more about it”.

The Guga Hunt campaign started from a similarly small base and a similar lack of awareness that the End Bird Shooting campaign faces. It didn’t move because of one court case. It moved because enough people were presented with the evidence and ultimately refused to look away.

That’s what this footage is for. Not a single prosecution, but a body of evidence that makes crystal clear what “standard practice” in bird shooting actually looks like, day after day, farm after farm, estate after estate - so that the gap between the industry’s own lobbying and welfare/conservation claims and its cages, conveyor belts, traps, and suffering becomes impossible to explain away.

So here’s what we’re asking. Not to sign something or turn up somewhere - there’s no petition open, no protest planned. Just this: learn what’s actually happening. Read our articles. Understand what a ‘game farm’ looks like; what ‘gamekeeping’ is all about; what a shoot day actually involves; what really happens to the animals and the land impacted by this horrible industry.

Then talk to the people in your lives who don’t know. Share what you learn. Be proud to say ‘Enough is enough’ and be proud that you can reject industry propaganda because you know it is wrong and why.

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Movements are built step by step, push after push. They create change only when enough people have enough information that they can no longer accept industry explanations that simply don’t hold up.

That’s how fox hunting ended. That’s how the Guga hunt licence got rejected this year. And it’s how bird shooting will end too.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

Months of investigation like the work detailed above. Hundreds of hours of footage obtained and more being gathered. Farms across the UK exposed.

We are at the beginning of something that we think will change everything.

But we can’t do it on our own. We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To help us fund investigations, take on more staff, to stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.

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Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, then how adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated, and the enormous numbers of eggs collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers. In our last article we looked at very young chicks being ‘sexed’ and sorted. But we didn’t explain why…

The fact is that some chicks are pulled from the line because they are judged unfit to be worth the cost of rearing…

In our previous article we looked at very young chicks being ‘sorted’ in a noisy facility on a ‘game farm’. It was by necessity a condensed story. We couldn’t possibly have published all the footage we have - there is far too much of it for a Substack newsletter. If we had been able to do so, though, you would have seen the same thing that we did: every so often, one of the workers reaches down, picks up a chick, and drops it not into the trays heading onward toward the brooders, but into a different one - a tray already holding other discarded material.

This second tray is the sorting line’s endpoint for a chick that is unable to stand or is otherwise judged (at this very young age) not to meet the standard the farm wants for a bird it plans to sell. There is no vet on that line. There is no medical examination. There is a worker, moving at pace, making a snap decision about whether a days-old animal lives or dies based on nothing more than what can be seen in the second or two it takes to lift the bird up and look at it.

No attempt is made to treat an ‘unfit’ chick, or even to establish whether whatever is wrong is treatable. The young bird is simply removed, and his or her fate - as we’ll cover in the next article in this series - is to be macerated, ground up alongside the rest of the day’s waste.

‘Sorting’ - a judgement made in under two seconds

It’s worth looking at what this “sorting” actually entails, because the word perhaps makes it sound clinical, considered, even humane. It is not.

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It is people rifling through crates of birds or standing by a moving conveyor belt hastily deciding whether a bird lives or dies.

There is no one here who can be absolutely certain which conditions are survivable. A chick that cannot stand may have splayed legs, a minor and often correctable condition. A chick with a slightly crossed beak might go on to feed and grow entirely normally with a little support. None of that is taken into consideration because the job is not about welfare; it is about keeping things moving.

A chick that doesn’t ‘look right’ isn’t a diagnostic puzzle to be thought about; it’s just something to be discarded, tossed away like a defective product on an assembly line.

That’s what happens when a live, sentient animal is fed into a system designed for speed and throughput. There is no room for sentiment, for a “let’s wait and see,” for anything resembling the care an animal in obvious difficulty might reasonably be owed.

The chick either passes inspection in the time it takes to glance at it, or it doesn’t.

Speed is everything, and if a chick gets stuck and injured on the line and no one seems to notice because they’re so intent on checking for ‘healthy’ birds, well, that’s just a bit of bad luck, isn’t it…

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Units, not individuals

This is really the heart of it. An industrialised hatchery will not, and structurally cannot, treat each bird as an individual with its own chance of recovery or improvement. It treats every chick on that belt as a unit of production, one of tens of thousands moving through the building that day, valuable only if it will grow into a bird that can produce eggs or can be sold to be shot at.

A ‘unit’ that doesn’t meet the base specification isn’t nursed, isn’t assessed, isn’t given the benefit of the doubt. It’s removed from the batch, the same way a fruit-packing line removes bruised apples or misshapen carrots before the good stock is boxed for a supermarket. That comparison isn’t for dramatic effect, incidentally - it’s the logic the industry has built into its own handling systems.

A visual check, a split-second judgement, a discard tray, is a sickening version of ‘quality control’. It is most certainly not any version of veterinary triage. And it is being applied to conscious animals capable of suffering.

That distinction should matter enormously. It appears not to matter at all to an industry designed to process living beings at pace.

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What this tells us about the industry

This is what happens, structurally, when an industry breeds tens of millions of live animals a year for a single purpose - supplying birds to be shot for entertainment - and prices every one of those animals as expendable stock from the moment they hatch.

An industry that has already decided the great majority of the birds it breeds will be killed by paying guns within a few months of release has already decided that the individual bird doesn’t matter very much. It factors in a certain amount of loss from the outset. Discarding a “defective” chick, deciding with a brief look that it can’t be saved, is simply that logic applied slightly earlier in the timeline.

The industry constantly tells the public it cares about the welfare of the birds it rears, that shooting is compatible with, even reliant on, good husbandry. The tray sitting beside that sorting belt says otherwise.

When care is genuinely inconvenient to the pace of production, it is always the belt, not the bird, that wins.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

Months of investigation like the work detailed above. Hundreds of hours of footage obtained and more being gathered. Farms across the UK exposed.

We are at the beginning of something that we think will change everything.

But we can’t do it on our own. We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To help us fund investigations, take on more staff, to stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, then how adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated, and the enormous numbers of eggs collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers. We’re now going to look at what happens to the chicks the industry breeds for the gun…

On a so-called ‘game farm’ a pheasant chick’s first hours in the world are spent in darkness, huddled for warmth beneath the red glow of a brooder lamp. At this stage, a pheasant chick is about as fragile as a living creature can be.

And yet within days, that same chick is pulled from the dark and carried into a different world entirely - a factory floor loud with people and machinery, bright with strip lighting, where this tiny animal is handled, sexed, and dropped onto a moving metal conveyor belt alongside thousands of other chicks.

It is a jarring transition for any young animal, let alone one this delicate: from stillness to noise, from shelter to exposure and the mechanical efficiency of an industrial sorting line. Ground-nesting and precocial birds like pheasants are born with an instinct to see large, fast-moving silhouettes as potential threats; however, on the factory line there is no mother to guide or comfort, and no experience to interpret the shock of this enormous change. Yet this is where the story of the “game” pheasant really begins - not in some scenic, unspoiled woodland, but on a production line built for volume, speed, and profit.

Looking at the images and video in this post we think it is clear that to the workers standing at that belt, hour after hour, thousands of birds a day, the chick is just one more item to be sorted, moved, processed. But a chick is not a package at a fulfilment centre. A chick is not a vegetable being checked for blemishes. This is a very young animal, small enough to fit in a cupped palm, their bones still soft.

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What the rules actually say

A chick is an animal that, by the industry’s own guidelines, is supposed to be handled with a level of care that this footage simply does not show.

The UK government’s Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes (in other words, how birds reared to be used as live targets ought to be treated) exists precisely because hatchery and rearing work happens at a pace and scale where birds can easily be forgotten as individuals.

The code is explicit that management practices must not be compromised by the speed of operation, and that birds must be handled by competent, experienced people in a way that avoids injury.

The RSPCA’s own welfare standards for hatcheries go further, stating plainly that birds must be handled carefully and compassionately at all times, that care must be taken to prevent injury during handling, and that manual handling should be kept to an absolute minimum.

These are not vague aspirations. They are specific, written acknowledgements that day-old chicks are fragile enough to be hurt by rough handling - bruised, crushed, or injured by falls that would mean nothing to an inert object like a carrot but everything to a body this small.

Watch the belt again with that in mind. Each bird weighs perhaps 30 to 40 grams. Bones have not hardened. Legs are not yet reliably load-bearing. A chick has no way to brace for a fall, no way to signal distress that a worker moving at speed has time to notice.

When a chick is carried along by a machine built to move inert material efficiently, ‘it’ is being treated exactly as the machine was designed for - as a unit, a product, not as a live animal that can suffer.

This isn’t really about ‘bad workers’ - it’s about a ‘bad industry’

It would be easy, and wrong, to make this article about cruel individuals though. What the footage shows looks far more like the consequence of industrial scale: workers processing thousands of eggs and chicks a day, on a line moving at a pace set by production targets they did not choose, doing a repetitive task until the animals in front of them stop registering as animals at all.

Even when one of those tiny and vulnerable chicks is trapped between two trays, in danger of being dragged under and crushed by the spinning rollers…

Become a Game Changer

Psychologists call this a kind of perceptual numbing - when a task is repeated often enough and fast enough, the brain stops processing each instance individually. A chick becomes a unit, not an individual. That is not malice. It is a coping mechanism. It is what industrial-scale processing of living creatures does to the people doing it, and it is exactly why welfare codes insist on limits regardless of how anyone happens to feel in the moment.

That is also why the responsibility for what this footage shows lies not with the person standing at the belt, but with the system that put them there - one that sets throughput targets which make the code’s language about care and minimal handling almost impossible to honour in practice.

One that, by treating chicks as an inert commodity teaches everyone who works within it to see them the same way.

Will anyone be prosecuted?

We’re often asked whether we could prosecute based on the evidence we have, and in this case the honest answer is: probably not. Causing an animal unnecessary suffering is a criminal offence in this country, but courts have historically reserved that finding for conduct that is unambiguous: visible injury, obvious distress, sustained mistreatment.

A chick tumbling a short distance onto a moving belt among other chicks, without a clear injury on camera, is unlikely to meet that threshold on its own, however hard it is to watch.

What footage like this does show, though, is something a criminal charge was never going to capture anyway: the physical set-up and pace of work of an industry-standard ‘sorting’ system sits uneasily beside the very code of practice the industry says it follows - a code that requires chicks to be handled with care and that manual handling be kept to a minimum.

We don’t know, and can’t claim to know, whether the staff on that belt had received sufficient training to meet those standards. Our footage covered a short window, and the undercover worker didn’t have an opportunity to speak to everyone. The farm would undoubtedly claim that they provide sufficient training anyway.

What the footage does show, though, is what actually happened in that window, regardless of what training was given: the gap between a published guide to careful handling and what a moving belt actually does to a tiny and vulnerable bird passing along it.

It is, if anything, a harder thing to explain than a criminal case would be, because there is no dispute to have about it: the code exists, and the footage (and we have plenty more of it) speaks for itself.

Become a Game Changer

A small moment, a larger question

Millions of pheasant chicks pass through hatcheries like this one every year, destined for release onto shooting estates as live targets, to be shot for so-called “sport.” The belt wasn’t designed to be cruel. It was built to be fast and efficient.

But a hatchery is not a factory sorting non-sentient fruit or vegetables, whatever the equipment suggests - and even the short clip in this post shows exactly how easily that distinction disappears when speed and volume matter more than the animal moving through the system.

We are routinely challenged about why we aim to shut down this vile industry. Look at the screenshots and the footage again. These are the first fragile hours of a bird’s life. The rest of that life will be as short and brutal.

How anyone can support any of this is absolutely beyond us…

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

  Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Full-time | £35,000 to £40,000 depending on experience | Location: Remote (occasional travel for events and in-person activities) | UK Applicants only | Deadline: 7th August

About the role

Protect the Wild is looking for a Campaigner/Content Creator to work on our End Bird Shooting campaign, one of the biggest fights we run against one of the biggest killers of British wildlife.

This campaign is about ending bird shooting in the UK, full stop. That means tackling head-on the producers and so-called ‘game farms’, the estates where the killing takes place, and shooting’s clients. It means working to end the killing of birds bred and released by the million to be shot for “sport,” it means working to end grouse shooting on our moors, and it means stopping every other form of bird shooting that goes on across this country. Millions of animals are killed every year by this industry, and most of the public has no real idea of the scale of it, or the suffering behind it. Our job is to change that.

This is a campaign with huge potential. Done right, it can help prevent an enormous amount of suffering and bring an industry that’s hidden in plain sight into the full glare of public attention. We want someone who can help us take EBS from a strong campaign to one that breaks through into mainstream consciousness, the kind of story people can’t scroll past.

We’re looking to grow and expand this campaign significantly over the coming months and years, building out a dedicated team around it. This role is about leading that charge from the front. This isn’t a job for someone who wants to tick boxes. We need someone with ideas, who can spot an opportunity before we point it out, who takes ownership of the campaign and runs with it, working directly with our founder to build and deliver a long-term strategy against the shooting industry in the UK.

It’s an exciting opportunity to join the Protect the Wild network and be part of the fastest-growing animal rights organisation in the country.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading content strategy and output for End Bird Shooting across social media and Substack

• Planning content calendars, writing sharp and engaging copy, and turning research into stories people actually want to read and share

• Spotting trends, news hooks, and campaign opportunities, and moving fast when they appear

• Creating graphics, carousels, and video content using Adobe Creative Suite and/or Canva

• Making sure everything we put out reflects Protect the Wild’s values and tone, direct, factual, and impossible to ignore

• Working closely with our founder on the long-term direction of the campaign, and having real input into where it goes next

• Building your own knowledge of the shooting industry into genuine expertise, you’ll become one of the people who knows this issue better than almost anyone else in the country

Who we’re looking for

• Someone who cares about ending the shooting industry; some of the material we have to look at is upsetting and unpleasant, so this must be a genuine passion, not just ‘a job’.

• Confident, proficient content creator, you know your way around Adobe Creative Suite (Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) and/or Canva and can produce professional-looking content without hand-holding.

• Some existing knowledge of the bird shooting industry, game shooting, or wildlife campaigning is preferable, but, if not, a genuine willingness to learn fast and become an expert is a must.

• A strong grasp of what makes content perform on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and an instinct for storytelling.

• Proactive and full of ideas, you don’t wait to be told what to do, you bring things to the table.

• Comfortable working independently and taking real ownership of a campaign.

• Good writing skills, clear, punchy, factually accurate copy that cuts through.

How to apply

Please send us:

1. Your CV to jobs@protectthewild.org.uk

2. A 5-slide Instagram carousel for the End Bird Shooting account, along with a short explanation of your thinking behind it

For the carousel: go through our End Bird Shooting Substack and find a story or angle we haven’t covered yet, something we’ve missed, overlooked, or not gone far enough on. Build a carousel around it that you think would genuinely perform well on social media, and tell us why. Email this to: jobs@protectthewild.org.uk

Investigations

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, and how the adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated. We’ve also looked briefly at how enormous numbers of eggs are collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers, where - as we explained - wild birds including Magpies were visiting those dumped eggs.

We pointed out at the time that Magpies are routinely targeted by the shooting industry as a species that must be "controlled" because they are supposedly too numerous and too great a threat to ‘ground-nesting birds (ie pheasants and grouse) and other wildlife.

Here is one way this awful, cruel industry carries out that ‘control’, and how it gets around laws that were meant to protect wild birds…

Larsen Traps

Behind the language of “predator control” and “conservation,” the shooting industry relies on a largely unobserved - and at the moment, lawful - practice: using live wild birds as bait to lure and kill other wild birds.

That ‘control’ extends to all parts of the shooting industry. Undercover footage we were forwarded recently came from a so-called ‘game farm’ (not a shooting estate, the farm where birds are produced for the gun) and was filmed earlier this year. It gives a rare, unfiltered look at what ‘control’ can actually look like on the ground - and it is a long way from the tightly regulated, welfare-conscious system the industry likes to describe.

The footage passed to us shows a Larsen trap. This is a small cage with two compartments, one typically holding a live decoy bird and the other set to snap shut around any corvid (or raptor) coming to investigate the decoy. This trap was baited with pheasant eggs. (On a side note, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) originally championed the introduction of Larsen traps from Denmark in 1988, a claim repeated on their website which states these awful things were “pioneered in the UK by the GWCT and its regional advisory team”.)

Inside the trap sat a Magpie, a wild bird, kept alive as a lure. Food provided was a dried-out pheasant carcass (not a permitted food source under the rules that are meant to govern this practice). A water container held algae sludge.

Return visits told the rest of the story. Days later, the pheasant remains had been picked to the bone and not replenished. The water had not been changed. The Magpie’s tail feathers were gone - whether through deliberate clipping or through the bird battering itself against the mesh in distress we cannot say for certain, but neither explanation reflects well on whoever was meant to be checking that cage.

By the final visit, there was no food left at all and the same foul water. The Magpie had been abandoned to starve and dehydrate inside a trap from which there was no escape.

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A second Larsen trap, found separately, told a similar story. The only food was a scraped-clean set of old bones and the provided water was thick and green with algae. In this cage, the decoy Magpie was already dead.

Ironically, both traps had a perch fitted - a ‘welfare provision’ that cannot possibly stop a bird from dying of thirst.

The legal framework these traps are supposed to operate under

Larsen traps are not illegal. Lobbying by the shooting industry has made sure of that. In England (where this pheasant farm is located) they are operated under General Licences issued by Natural England, which exist as exemptions from the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981’s protection of wild birds.

Shooting lobbyists have whipped up a storm of hatred aimed at Magpies. Traps like these litter the countryside. If they had bothered to read what the General Licences say, a pheasant farm using one to trap Magpies would probably claim it is to protect pheasant eggs and poults. It would (if they had bothered etc etc) be relying on a purpose-specific licence, most likely GL42 (a licence to control birds ‘to prevent serious damage to livestock’ - which includes “gamebirds kept in an enclosure or which are free-roaming but remain significantly dependent on the provision of food, water, or shelter (by and within the release pen) by a keeper for their survival” - the same ‘gamebirds’ which will be sold to be ‘damaged’ by shooters of course) or perhaps GL40 which allows the killing or taking of Magpies to conserve “wild birds of conservation concern” - which clearly doesn’t include non-native pheasants (or Red-legged Partridges).

It’s also worth noting that if relying on GL40 there is a "reasonable endeavour to use alternative lawful methods" requirement which applies specifically when acting against Carrion Crows, Jays and Magpies…

Whichever purpose-licence applies, its use of traps and decoys is only lawful if it also complies with a second document that sits underneath all of them: GL33, “Trapping wild birds: standard licence conditions.”

GL33 sets out what “adequate” provision actually means in practice. GL33 is not optional extra guidance - it is a binding condition of the licence itself:

• Food must be sufficient, palatable, and of a type suited to the decoy species. There must be enough to sustain the bird between an operator’s visits, and if carrion is used for a corvid decoy it must be fresh, with enough meat left on it to meet the bird’s needs. Dried-out pheasant remains picked to the bone do not meet that standard.

• Water must be available at all times: drinkable, free of contamination, and changed regularly to stay clean - a description that algae-choked sludge plainly fails.

• GL33 also requires decoy birds to have appropriate shelter and a suitable perch, and requires traps to be checked at least once every 25 hours - a rule that these two examples clearly suggest was not being followed with anything like that regularity, if at all.

This matters legally as well as morally, because while General Licences don’t need to be applied for (which in our opinion is a clear loophole for their exploitation) they come with conditions. Where GL33’s welfare conditions are NOT being met, the exemption to the Wildlife & Countryside Act that the purpose-licence provides DOES NOT hold for that instance of trapping.

In other words, the conditions filmed here change what should have been abhorrent but lawful, licensed control into abhorrent unlawful taking and possession of a wild bird contrary to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 - a criminal offence sitting alongside, not instead of, any welfare offence.

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Where the Animal Welfare Act comes in

The conditions found here also bring in the Animal Welfare Act 2006 (AWA). The AWA sits entirely independently of the wildlife licensing framework we described above. It applies to any “protected animal” (in legal terms that means ‘under the control of a person’, which includes a captive decoy bird) regardless of which general licence, if any, was being relied on at the time.

Two sections of the AWA are directly relevant here.

• Section 4 makes it an offence to cause a protected animal unnecessary suffering, or to fail to take reasonable steps to prevent it, where a person knew or ought reasonably to have known that an act or omission would have that effect. A bird left to starve over a period of days, watching its food disappear without replacement, sits squarely within what this section was written to capture.

• Section 9 goes further, creating a positive duty of care: anyone responsible for an animal must take reasonable steps to ensure its welfare needs are met, including a suitable environment, a suitable diet, the ability to exhibit normal behaviour patterns, appropriate housing with or apart from other animals as needed, and protection from pain, suffering, injury and disease. A single perch in an otherwise barren cage, with fouled water and no fresh food, does not come close to satisfying that duty regardless of what the General Licence’s minimum conditions technically require.

Why this isn’t an isolated technicality

Supporters of the shooting industry - whom for good reason we routinely describe as ‘wilfully blind’ to the horrors surrounding their chosen hobby - will undoubtedly claim that most trap operators are not behaving like this. The usual ‘rotten apple’ script they like to wave around, in other words. Unlike us, though, they are not providing evidence to prove that assertion, and, given the litany of abuses that anyone who looks into this blood-soaked industry will be aware of, why should we believe them?

They might also claim that ‘operator errors’ like these are breaches of a set of rules rather than anything that can be challenged on legal grounds. They would be wrong. The Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Animal Welfare Act are laws, not guidelines. And anyway, that argument simply blasts wide open the weakest point of the whole system: General Licence trapping in England is a weak system that is essentially self-policed by the same industry that stands to benefit most from abusing it.

• There is no routine inspection regime,

• no independent verification that decoy birds are fed, watered and checked daily,

• and enforcement depends almost entirely on chance discoveries like this one - usually made by investigators, hunt saboteurs or members of the public, rather than by any statutory body checking traps in the field.

Magpies starving in cages while being used to bait other wild birds so they can be killed too is a disgrace. These poor birds are a strong argument for getting rid of General Licences and for asking why the hell the self-serving shooting industry should be allowed to regulate itself at all…

… though the answer is probably that no one in authority seems to care enough to do anything about it.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2026.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

Many of you have already responded and we are extremely grateful, but we are repeating our ask for you to become a Game Changer. We need to make people care. Please stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, and how the adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated. We’ve also looked briefly at how enormous numbers of eggs are collected and washed - and in some cases dumped unlawfully in open-air trailers…what we look at now is the birds visiting those dumped eggs.

Forgive us for a touch of repetition, but - once again - undercover footage obtained by our investigators shows a disturbing scene at a so-called “game farm”. This time we’re back at Cambrian Birds and their open-air trailer crawling with maggots and piled high with discarded pheasant eggs - some containing the remains of unhatched or partially developed chicks.

We can be certain of that last claim, because this is the same site where, as we reported previously, our investigator found a live chick struggling among the wreckage (see Thrown Away Alive).

That earlier discovery was so shocking it prompted the investigator to place a camera nearby as they suspected wild birds and/or foxes and rats would be attracted to the dump and its abundant ‘food source’.

And indeed that was the case. The footage captured by the camera shows a steady stream of wild birds descending on the dump to feed. Magpies, Jackdaws, Ravens, and Carrion Crows all filmed in real-time picking through the pile, pulling out broken eggs and what are clearly the corpses of pheasant chicks.

On several occasions, a Common Buzzard - a protected bird of prey targeted on some shooting estates - was recorded at the site as well, drawn in by the same grim buffet.

An Open Invitation to Disease

The camera was placed on-site for several days. It was pointed at the trailer but also shows a dung heap to its left, just a metre or so away, which corvids in particular appeared to be using as a ‘watch point’ to monitor the dump.

Here is a brief snapshot of the notes we took while going through the footage (each recording lasts 3 minutes). Birds came and went, but in just two hours on one day EIGHT bird species were identified and at least EIGHT individual birds were seen at any one time. It’s entirely possible that as many as twenty individuals in total were observed, and - given the time of year (June) - also possible that these birds were feeding young with this ‘waste’.

Become a Game Changer

02/JUNE/2025

REC000067 Birds in and around trailer – Magpies and Carrion Crows

REC000068 Carrion Crows flying onto and standing on trailer

REC000069 Jackdaw on trailer, Mallard drake and duck on dung heap by trailer

REC000082 Two Ravens (calling at 00:02:06) and a Magpie in trailer on dumped eggs

REC000083 Raven carrying egg in beak flies away. Two Magpies and Jackdaw perched on trailer.

REC000084 Carrion Crow again in traileron dumped eggs

REC000085 Carrion Crow carrying egg in beak flies away from trailer of dumped eggs

REC000086 Raven and two Magpies in trailer on dumped eggs

REC000087 Raven flying away with egg, Jackdaw in trailer on dumped eggs

REC000088 Two Ravens in trailer on dumped eggs. One Raven flies off with egg in beak.

REC000089 Guinea fowl scratching around on dung heap next to trailer. Raven lands and drops onto dumped eggs in trailer. Magpie and Jackdaw on trailer.

REC000090 Five Jackdaws (four on dung heap, one on trailer) in view at same time

REC000091 Raven returns and it, five Jackdaws and two magpies (eight birds) in view at same time. Carrion Crow returns.

REC000097 Two Magpies on dumped eggs in trailer. Raven lands on dung heap.

REC000098 Raven on trailer. Three Magpies on dumped eggs on trailer. Second Raven flies in, first Raven flies off with second bird – calls heard well. Carrion Crow on skip. Common Buzzard appears in trailer on dumped eggs.

REC000099 Common Buzzard in trailer on dumped eggs.

REC000100 Common Buzzard in trailer on dumped eggs.

REC000101 Common Buzzard in trailer on dumped eggs.

REC000102 Common Buzzard in trailer on dumped eggs.

REC000103 Common Buzzard in trailer on dumped eggs. Walks off camera to right. Pied Wagtail on trailer. Blackbird on dung heap.

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Animal By-Product Regulations

What’s been recorded here is far more serious than just unpleasant viewing. Eggs and animal tissue of this kind fall under Animal By-Product Regulations, which exist precisely because uncontrolled disposal of this material can spread disease. These rules require that animal by-products, including hatchery waste, be handled, stored and disposed of in ways that prevent contamination and the transmission of pathogens - not left in the open for corvids and birds of prey to pick over.

By allowing wild birds direct access to this material, whatever pathogens may be present in it are no longer contained to a single trailer on a single farm. They are being carried out across the surrounding countryside in the digestive tracts, beaks and feet of every Magpie, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow, Raven, and Buzzard that visits.

Given the well-documented risks to wild birds of avian influenza and other transmissible diseases in poultry and gamebird populations, this is not a hypothetical concern. It is a plausible route by which disease could move from a commercial pheasant-rearing operation into the wider wild bird population, and potentially back again.

We believe this dump appears to represent a clear breach of the regulations designed to prevent exactly this kind of risk. It’s difficult to believe that the farm operator would be unaware of these regulations. We don’t know, but we can only assume that the owners and the staff assumed that because they were out in the countryside they would never be caught.

Whatever the reason, our footage raises serious questions about how this site - and others like it (investigators are still out there recording more damning footage) - are managing the biological waste that mass pheasant production inevitably generates.

Irony alert

Anyone who follows the destruction wreaked by the shooting industry will recognise a bitter irony in exactly which species are turning up to feed at this dump: Magpies, Jackdaws and Carrion Crows are routinely named by the shooting industry as species that must be "controlled" because they are supposedly too numerous and too great a threat to pheasants, grouse, and other wildlife.

Buzzards, too, despite being a protected bird of prey, are a species we know the industry considers a problem to be managed (see Gamekeeper guilty of clubbing Buzzard to death and Buzzard shot in North York Moors National Park).

Yet here they are, drawn in not because they are running rampant across the countryside unchecked, but because the industry itself has left out a ready supply of food for them.

Recognise a familiar pattern? This is the same industry that by releasing tens of millions of pheasants into the countryside every year artificially inflates the food supply available to foxes, then presents fox "control" as a necessary response to a problem largely of its own making.

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We are naming this farm - but…

We have previously identified this so-called ‘game farm’. That was a deliberate choice to support local opposition.

But our investigations have not been limited to a single site. We are still visiting and documenting conditions at numerous other farms breeding birds for the gun, and what we have found clearly points to a pattern rather than an isolated failure.

The shooting industry is in full denial mode already, but we have plenty more evidence to come: we are not going to allow this industry to write off what we’ve uncovered as the actions of one “rotten apple” operator because that simply is not the case.

We will be naming other farms in upcoming articles, but it is important to understand that this is not a story about one farm cutting corners.

It is a story about how the pheasant shooting industry as a whole treats surplus eggs and dead chicks as an afterthought - something to be tipped into a trailer rather than dealt with responsibly, regardless of the risks that poses to disease control and to the wild birds drawn in by the smell of decay.

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer

This week we published a heartbreaking article written by an investigator who found a live pheasant chick in a trailer filled with maggots and thousands of discarded eggshells.

We subtitled the article, ‘Can you imagine finding a live chick in an egg dump? Now you don’t have to.”

In that article, the investigator wrote:

“I almost don’t pay attention to the maggots because something else forces me to frantically search. The chirping is faint, but constant, and it seems to come from everywhere, so I don’t hesitate. I climb onto the edge of the trailer and start shifting the maggot-covered eggshells. My hands are shaking. I search desperately, shifting eggs, then stopping to listen, then shifting eggs again, in what feels like a soup of eggs, and egg waste, and maggots.”

Those lines sum up the awful reality of what investigators do, night after night, day after day.

To us, that paragraph especially proved (as if it needed proving) that there is a particular kind of courage that doesn’t announce itself. It clocks in quietly, does its job, and goes home. Then gets up and does it all again.

Protect the Wild’s undercover investigation team spent months carrying out the most-detailed expose of the shooting industry ever carried out. They are still working, finding abuses, as you’re reading this.

Investigators love animals

The team love animals. That is not incidental to this story. It is the whole point. None of the team came to this work indifferent to suffering. They came to it precisely because they cannot bear suffering - and because they passionately believe that the only way to end it is to witness, record it, and publish it to as large an audience as possible.

Become a Game Changer

Every day they walk onto those farms - into the noise, the stress, the smell - they experience everything we have been showing you in our Investigations articles.

• The sick birds left untreated or ‘fixed’ by unqualified staff.

• The dead - and LIVE - birds thrown in skips.

• The birds left overnight in crates with no food or water.

• The everyday cruelty dressed up as husbandry.

• The suffering that farm staff have stopped registering because it has become so routine, so normal, so simply ‘the way things are done’.

Our investigators never stop registering any of it. They can’t. It hurts, and it upsets. That is the weight they carried through every shift, every filmed moment, every night afterwards.

Live chick found in egg dump at Cambrian Birds.

Become a Game Changer

Intervention? Not an option.

Supporters have asked the question: when they saw the abuse, the suffering, the mistreatment, why didn’t the investigators intervene?

It’s a fair question, but it misunderstands what results undercover investigators are working towards.

Even if investigators want to intervene, they don’t for several reasons.

• One is that they face immense risks, including retaliation and violence, and blowing their cover can put themselves in great personal danger. Immediately. Not ‘down the road’ or ‘sometime later’ right there and then.

• As importantly, they have to make difficult choices every day they work because the goal of investigations like these is to show the world what is taking place.

They have to think long-term because they are working to document and expose abuse. If an investigator intervenes to save a single animal (no matter how much they want to), it will alert the staff and management. They risk having the filmed evidence taken off them, getting beaten up, and then being kicked off the job, allowing the operators to continue - usually with ramped-up security.

These are hard and painful choices to make.

We won’t tell you the names of these investigators, of course, but we can share how profoundly this work affects everyone who does this vital work. That walking away from a dying animal you are not permitted to help - because to help would be to blow your cover, end the investigation, and ultimately save fewer lives - is not a calculation that becomes easier with time.

It is a choice made fresh every single day.

Lax regulations

It also misunderstands just how opaque and lax the regulations covering so-called ‘gamebirds’ are.

The shooting industry has written its own laws. It has made them as flexible as possible. It uses excuses that practices like fitting beak guards are done to prevent injury from feather-pecking - while ignoring the fact that the conditions the birds are kept in are why the attacks take place anyway.

What appears to us on the outside to be clear welfare breaches are often ‘allowed’ by lax laws and ‘grey area’ legislation.

Even though investigators know the law well, they are not going onto the farm to work as a legal expert: they will be undercover, posing as casual labour who may - perhaps - have some experience of the law but who certainly won’t be expected to tell senior staff what they should or should not be doing.

Again, to do so would put them in a dangerous position and potentially kill the process of evidence gathering on the spot.

Become a Game Changer

They record to make a difference

Investigators choose to watch and record (and will make that choice repeatedly) because they believe - and we believe - that the footage they gather will do more to protect birds than any single act of intervention ever could.

That it will make a difference.

That’s because it has an impact. Because the anger you feel watching the footage they collected, the anger you felt reading about the reality of breeding birds for the guns, is the same anger that the investigator felt and that we felt every time we examined the footage they had collected too.

We passionately believe that anger WILL BE BE A FORCE to shift public opinion and will ultimately end an industry that has remained hidden for far too long.

Not now, probably not next year, but in the end it will.

That is what kept them going. It is also what keeps us going.

And it is why we are asking you to help and support us by becoming a Game Changer.

Become a Game Changer

Long-term investigations like these do not happen without resources. They require time, equipment, meticulous planning, and the ongoing support of people willing to take the very real risk that, if identified, they would face harassment or violence from an industry that does not welcome scrutiny.

We are asking you, today, to help fund the next investigation. And the one after that.

The shooting industry hates the fact that we are working to shift the balance. It has tried to imply there is something ‘dodgy’ about us fundraising to investigate them. Think about the sheer hypocrisy, the sheer audacity of a claim like that. The shooting industry is hugely wealthy. It is extremely well-funded. It is bankrolled by some of the wealthiest landowners in Britain. It is also large and politically well-connected.

We are not. Want to know another difference? Unlike the self-serving shooting industry, we’re not doing any of this to enrich ourselves.

The birds the shooting industry exploits have no lobby, no legal team, and no voice of their own. What they have is investigators like ours - and organisations like Protect the Wild running campaigns like End Bird Shooting.

And supporters like you.

Yes, there is a cost to getting inside the shooting industry - but it’s not just financial. It is emotional too. Our investigators did the hardest thing so that you could know the truth.

They - and we - need your help to make sure that truth reaches further, and that the next farm - and the next - cannot hide. Whatever the cost.

• Screenshots and video recorded by investigators at farms across England.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Help fund the next investigation. Help us End Bird Shooting for good.

Become a Game Changer

We recently published an article which described the shocking story of one of our undercover investigators finding a LIVE chick in a pile of discarded eggshells on a so-called ‘game farm’ (see ‘Thrown Away Alive’).

One paragraph in particular stood out: “Using their hand, the investigator began carefully working through the debris. Within moments, they found the bird that was calling out: a live chick buried beneath the discarded shells of its siblings, too small and too weak to free itself.”

Many supporters emailed us to express their admiration for the investigator, telling us that they couldn’t imagine what looking for and finding abuse and cruelty like this would feel like. Neither could we. We passed this back to the investigator, who suggested that they write a personal account. This is what you’re about to read…

Supporters also wanted to know which so-called ‘game farm’ this took place on. We didn’t name the farm in the first article for the reasons we explained, but we’ve now discussed with the investigation team whether naming the farm would jeopardise current investigations. They are sure it won’t, and they explained that many locals oppose this particular operation and that this information will be important to their fight.

And after all, we’ve done nothing wrong here. This is all on Cambrian Birds…

Become a Game Changer

“During years crawling in cow slurry, squeezing through gaps in a barn wall and seeing the continuous abuse that animals are subjected to, you build a thick skin to keep going.

Sometimes, the thick skin is so heavy that I need to touch base with others and show them what I’ve filmed, just to understand how others react to the grim and abusive conditions animals are subjected to on a regular basis. Other times, the thick skin does nothing to protect you from what you have to see.

Surrounded by sheep in lamb, on a still night in early summer, I walk towards Cambrian Birds’ hatchery.

Cambrian Sporting (“an unforgettable day in the field”) has made headlines recently, with locals on the border between Shropshire and Wales organising against the takeover of the shooting grounds in multiple villages in the area. I don’t know what to expect, but I know that whatever comes out of it will aid those locals in their fight against Cambrian Birds with even more evidence of their disregard for anything that isn’t money.

They did not disappoint.

As I approach the farm, the stench hits me. The smell, a mixture of rotten eggs and decomposing corpses, makes it difficult to ignore the enormous pile of eggs and shells in the open field. Beside it sits a fresher trailer of eggshells. As I approach it, breathing heavily, I hear chirping.

With my heart in my throat, I run towards the waste trailer. I can’t breathe. I notice it moves, but it doesn’t move like I would expect it to; it moves like quicksand, wavy, like a thick liquid. It isn’t a liquid, though, well, at least not all of it.

The movement is maggots, tens of thousands of maggots, crawling, digging, seeking something else to eat.

I almost don’t pay attention to the maggots because something else forces me to frantically search. The chirping is faint, but constant, and it seems to come from everywhere, so I don’t hesitate. I climb onto the edge of the trailer and start shifting the maggot-covered eggshells. My hands are shaking. I search desperately, shifting eggs, then stopping to listen, then shifting eggs again, in what feels like a soup of eggs, and egg waste, and maggots.

For a while, it feels like an impossible task. I feel hopeless. But then I find a chick, tiny, and wet, and probably only minutes old, and they are alive.

Become a Game Changer

As I reach for the chick I realise how small they are, how fragile, how vulnerable. I no longer feel that knot in my throat. Now it is in my stomach, heavy, all-encompassing.

How can anyone let such a tender creature be born in a pile of trash? How can anyone leave them to die, discarded like rubbish?

I turn around and hand the chick to my colleague, who runs back to the vehicle to keep them warm. Meanwhile, I am back practically swimming in the trailer, trying to dig out all the other chicks I can hear chirping under the eggs.

No matter how much I dig, shift eggs, and dig again. I cannot find them, even when I can hear them, and an hour after my colleague left for the car, I reluctantly decide to call it a night.

I leave a camera pointing at that trailer, which the day after would film corvids and a Buzzard picking around the eggs and eating the chicks. Somehow, the Buzzard knew exactly where to look. I don’t know if I’d rather those chicks had survived the night, or had died before the Buzzard found them.

When I get to the car, the chick looks dry and the feathers look better. They’ve been nursed between the heat of the aircon and the skin contact of their caregiver. They don’t look great, though, so we hurry back to put them under a brooder.

The day after, when we woke up, the chick had passed.

We laid them to rest under an ash tree, with cornflowers, clover and buttercups. Maybe another Buzzard found them too, or perhaps a fox cub learning to hunt. Either way, it fed the Earth. Silver linings, I suppose, even if they’re bitter.

Sometimes, the thick skin serves only to keep the anguish inside. That experience was likely one of those, desperate, hopeless, but eye-opening.

Cruelty knows no limits, not even when it comes to babies. I guess to them, in their twisted, sick tradition, that chick meant nothing. None of the birds they breed mean anything but the money they produce. But to me, that chick meant more than anyone could imagine.

I will not rest until bird shooting is nothing but a shameful corner of our collective memory.

Fly free, little one.”

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator at Cambrian Birds in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

Months of investigation like the work detailed above. Hundreds of hours of footage obtained and more being gathered. Farms across the UK exposed.

We are at the beginning of something that we think will change everything.

But we can’t do it on our own. We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To help us fund investigations, to stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away.

The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer

Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, and how the adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated. We’ve also looked briefly at how enormous numbers of eggs are collected and washed. Now we want to move on to the chicks that are produced from those eggs - and a word of warning, some of what we will be publishing (including the video and screenshots below) is distressing…

Last year, one of our investigators visited a commercial pheasant farm in the West Midlands looking to document the routine mechanics of the shooting industry’s supply chain. We will be discussing more about what they found in future articles, but this week we are focusing on something they weren’t expecting: an open-air skip, piled high with broken eggshells.

As they approached the skip in the pitch darkness, a sound stopped them in their tracks. A faint, unmistakable cheeping, coming from somewhere inside the pile of shell and waste.

Using their hand, the investigator began carefully working through the debris. Within moments, they found the bird that was calling out: a live chick buried beneath the discarded shells of its siblings, too small and too weak to free itself.

Become a Game Changer

The footage below shows the moment of discovery - the kicking and struggling of a small body pushing up through broken shells. What this clip doesn’t catch is the sound of at least one more chick calling out from somewhere deeper in the pile that our investigator could not reach in time.

This chick was pulled free and taken from the site to a rehabber. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the bird died a short time later.

Not ‘just another video’

Our undercover investigators filmed some truly shocking video, but this was some of the most heartbreaking. The vulnerability of this helpless chick, thrown out like trash, will never leave any of us. So much was filmed that made us determined to expose and shut down this industry, but this - this short video - has fuelled our fire for the long months we have been working on this campaign…

However, we want to be honest here about what we can and cannot claim.

• We do not have footage proving that other chicks were left to suffocate or starve in that skip, though the cheeping our investigator heard suggests strongly that this chick was not alone.

• We are not alleging that anyone at this farm deliberately discarded a living animal.

What we believe happened is, in some ways, worse precisely because it is so mundane: this is what happens when a business model depends on part-time, seasonal labour processing tens of thousands of eggs a week, with no real time or incentive built in to check that every single one is non-viable before it goes in the skip.

Let’s be frank: a system that makes this kind of death routine and invisible is failing these animals just as completely as if it had been done on purpose.

Become a Game Changer

Breaches of waste legisaltion

That failure doesn’t end with this one chick. In the days that followed, a hidden camera filmed Carrion Crows, Magpies, Jackdaws and a Common Buzzard repeatedly visiting the same skip, searching through it, and pulling out eggs and what appeared to be the bodies of chicks and carrying them away.

This matters because an open skip that wild birds can access and feed from is not just an eyesore. Under UK law, eggshells and hatchery waste from a poultry or so-called ‘game-bird’ operation are classified as Animal By-products, and their disposal is tightly regulated for exactly this reason: uncontrolled waste from bird-rearing sites is a recognised route for the spread of disease, including avian influenza, between captive and wild bird populations.

We will be reporting separately, with fuller footage, on what we documented of wild birds using this site.

Swept into a skip

For now, though, we keep coming back to the chick, swept into a skip and spending what may have been hours buried under waste, calling out, until a stranger’s hand happened to find him or her.

That image is hard to shake. It should be. An industry that produces this many eggs, at this pace, with this little oversight of what happens to the ones that hatch by accident, is an industry that has normalised a level of casual disregard for animal life that most people, we suspect, would find genuinely shocking if they saw it for themselves.

The sound of that chick crying out from a pile of shells will stay with our investigator, and with us, longer than most things we film.

But we also keep returning to one uncomfortable fact: had this chick never been thrown away, its future was already decided.

It would have been reared under lights, if a female, perhaps fitted with a beak guard like the hen pheasant in the image above (see Pinned Down and Terrified), moved on through a system designed for volume, and eventually caged, boxed, and driven out to a shoot - before being shot at by people ‘enjoying a day’s sport’.

Dying in that skip was not, in the end, a departure from what this industry had planned for it.

It was simply an earlier exit from the same production line.

Become a Game Changer

That is what we want people to sit with. Not just the horror of one chick calling out from a pile of shells, but the fact that everything about this industry, from the moment an egg is laid to the moment a bird is shot out of the sky, treats these animals as stock to be processed as quickly as possible. There is an awful casualness about this chick’s death that we think typifies the entire industry.

Like so much else we have documented.

We think the public has never really been shown what so-called ‘game rearing’ looks like from the inside - the scale, the waste, the indifference built into the system by design. That’s what Game Changer exists to change.

We’re calling on supporters to look at what we found and demand an end to practices that make a death like this one not just possible but unremarkable. Help us force this vile industry into the light.

As a final thought, perhaps readers will understand this without us saying it, but we are unashamedly pro- animal. Watching that footage made us angry. The kind of anger that doesn't fade after a second or third viewing. But anger isn't evidence, and it isn't what changes an industry - accuracy is.

So we have tried, throughout this piece, to describe only what we saw and filmed, and to be careful about what we do and do not claim.

We have also deliberately not named the farm at this stage - not to protect it, but because we don’t want this story reduced to a single “rotten apple” that lobbyists for the shooting industry will use to distance itself from what we have shown. What we found looks to us like the ordinary, predictable result of how this industry runs at scale, and we want readers to sit with that, not with a company name.

If the tone here perhaps reads as more measured than the moment deserved, that restraint was deliberate, not a reflection of how we actually felt watching a struggling and dying bird being pulled from under a pile of discarded egg shells…

• Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Become a Game Changer

End Bird Shooting

Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.

This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.

• We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.

Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.

Become a Game Changer