home > exposes > shooting



SARC investigates

After being sent some pictures of game birds, a SARC investigator went out to explore a shooting estate in Dorset. Here is her report and photographs:

“Veering off of the designated footpath, it did not take me long to find some tell-tale signs that pheasant pens were in the area. As I walked though a small area of woodland on the edge of a wheat field I came across the first countryside horror. Hundreds of flies hovered over the recently shot carcass of a young doe (photo A).

Photo A

I was even more shocked when I later found out that she had been shot illegally as the season does not begin until November. What kind of person can see a beautiful creature like this, and then kill her? Walking deeper into the trees, I spotted a rat trap (photo B). This vile tube filled with poison is indiscriminate in its killing. Whatever wanders into the trap will die, whether it is a rat, a mole, a mouse, a vole... These traps were littered across the forest.

Photo B

In a clearing stood a solitary hay bale. Draped across the top was a dead fox (photo C). Another innocent victim of the shooter’s guns. Gamekeepers will do anything to stop predators attacking ‘their’ birds. This includes shooting foxes and other large animals, as well as laying out traps.

Photo C

The game keepers cannot shoot every fox that approaches their pens, and so they lay out traps and snares (photo D). As with the poison traps, these horrific devices will catch anything that stumbles into them. They can cripple any animal, no matter how big. When I saw them I was relieved that I had left my dogs at home, it is not unknown for cats and dogs to wander into the woods, and never be seen again.

Photo D

These traps can be left unchecked for days, sometimes even weeks. Animals often resort to gnawing off their own leg.

The path of traps led me to a wall of mesh fencing (photo E) surrounded by an electric wire. Peering through the wire, I saw a number of birds. They were being kept alive simply so that they could be killed. Not only this, but to keep them alive, foxes had been shot, rats and other small mammals poisoned and larger mammals had been caught in cruel traps before they too were shot. The game industry is a barbaric cycle of violence that must be broken.”

Photo E

The Industry - The Facts

Despite the common belief that game birds are bred naturally, shot skillfully, and taken home for pies or other ‘food’, quite the opposite is occurring.

95% of game birds are raised in factory farm conditions; hatched in breeding machines and grown under glaring artificial lights, many having their beaks sawn every two weeks. Unlikely to actually survive this stage of their lives in such cramped and unnatural conditions, the birds are often drugged with Emtryl – a drug taken off the shelves in this country due to worries over cancer – and banned throughout most of the world.

Devices are often fitted over the beaks of the birds in an attempt to stop aggression, caused by the cramped conditions. The birds are then moved into mesh pens for the next stage towards becoming a flying target. The pens vary in size, although the vast number of birds means that room to move is limited.

Finally the Estate owners decide that the pheasant’s restricted and bleak lives must be ended. The pheasants, having never flown and nearing domestication, are released. What relief they must feel as they fly for the first time in their lives, and land in the nearby woods. Little do they know that they’re about to die.

At a charge reaching over £1,000 per day, shooters are granted access to the Estates to execute their desires - gunning down semi-tamed, factory farmed and perfectly harmless birds, then discarding their bodies to rot in the undergrowth.

Clipping from the Daily Mail:

In order to get the birds to fly, staff are hired as ‘beaters’. Their job is to go behind the birds and use a noisy whip-like instrument to make the pheasants fly… only to be shot down again.One beater told a local newspaper that he was “instructed to scare the birds into flying any way we could. If a poke up the backside with a stick didn’t work, we would give them a little encouragement with a boot. Sometimes, the cowering birds were simply picked up and thrown into the air!” Almost all of the birds which are shot are simply left in holes to perish. They are so plentiful in number due to excessive breeding, that they are thrown away rather than eaten. An British Association for Shooting executive admitted that “too many birds are being bred by big shoots. Meanwhile, inexperienced people are being encouraged to go after too many birds - sometimes killing more than they can even remember.” Similar findings were publicised in the Daily Mail. Mounds of rotting corpses were found; a by-product of a ‘sport’ of a few people willing to spend huge amounts of money on killing.

Game birds are factory farmed targets; shot down for the amusement of killing and left to rot amongst the surroundings in which they had every right to roam freely. This is a barbaric act... not a sport!