Every year in Britain, around 50 million pheasants and partridges are mass-produced like
factory-farmed chickens so that they can be shot down by wealthy 'guns', who commonly pay
£1,000 per day for the 'privilege'.
I see where you get the £1000 figure from. What difference does it make if the guns are wealthy or not? Could you suggest a maximal income level for participants in rural pursuits in the alternative? The misplaced class prejudice makes an entrance rather early on in this document doesn't it?
Industry statistics reveal that it costs at least 100 times more to produce a pheasant and to get
that bird airborne than the shot bird will ever earn for the shoot when sold to a dealer – clear
evidence, if it were needed, that this is an industry dedicated to rearing birds for ‘sport’ rather
than for food (Shooting Times, 19 January 2011).
Indeed it does, please refer to the documents above to find out where this money goes. Sport or food is a simplistic way of looking at shooting in the UK.
‘Game bird’ production typically involves the use of metal battery cages for breeding birds, as
well as industrial hatcheries, sheds and large pens.
• Hundreds of thousands of pheasants and partridges are confined for the whole of their
productive lives (around two years) in the kind of battery cages used for egg-laying hens.
Incarcerating chickens in such cages has attracted widespread condemnation from the public
and politicians across Europe, and moves are afoot to get them banned.
• In 2010, DEFRA Minister, Jim Paice, withdrew a Code of Practice for game bird production
that would have outlawed battery cages for breeding pheasants, and replaced it with one that
will effectively allow the cages to stay – albeit in their so-called ‘enriched’ form. This
generally means that they have a green plastic ‘curtain’ set towards the back of the cage for
privacy and a piece of dowel suspended on two bricks for perching. In reality, these
‘improvements’ make little difference to the bleak prisons and the distress of the caged birds.
• One male and between eight and ten female pheasants are imprisoned inside a galvanised
steel box fitted with a wire mesh sloping floor (so that the eggs can roll through for easy
collection). The roof is usually made from flexible wire netting, though some cages are
covered by rigid wire mesh, against which agitated birds repeatedly throw themselves and
cause physical injury. The cages are exposed to the elements and the birds have little respite
from the wind, rain, frost, snow or sun.
• Partridges are confined in breeding pairs in metal boxes that are correspondingly smaller and
just as bleak as the pheasant units.
"Pheasant farms, the one's that produce the poults, are as regulated as any other poultry farm "
Animal Aid’s undercover evidence of both the barren and the ‘enriched’ cage systems
demonstrate that the caged birds suffer a high incidence of emaciation, feather-loss and back
and head wounds. Many of the pheasants lunge repeatedly at their cage roofs in a forlorn
attempt to escape. The resulting damage to their heads is known as ‘scalping’.
• In an effort to eliminate the aggression among the birds caused by the crowded conditions in
the breeding cages, rearing sheds and release pens, gamekeepers fit the birds with restraining
devices over their beaks to prevent them from pecking their cage-mates. Even so, many still
suffer injuries and are fitted with protective dressings.
• The eggs are collected, incubated in ovens and, once hatched, the chicks are moved to heated
sheds, each typically holding one or two hundred birds. Attached to each shed is a small
outdoor covered run, to which the birds have access once they are considered hardy enough
"Pheasant farms, the one's that produce the poults, are as regulated as any other poultry farm "
At seven or eight weeks they are moved from the sheds to release enclosures – large fenced-in
units that can hold thousands of birds.
• As the partridge and pheasant shooting seasons approach (they extend from 1 September to 1
February) the birds are encouraged into fields of cover crops and, come shooting days, are
beaten up into the sky to serve as feathered targets.
This is how they are shot. Chicken are put in truck and taken to abattoirs where they hung by their legs alive and processed as simple commodities. It would appear then that the first rural business Animalaid should tackle are poultry farmers. At least, going by this document.
Because of the enfeeblement that results from being reared in captivity, around half of the
birds die before they can be gunned down. They perish from exposure, starvation, disease,
predation or under the wheels of motor vehicles
Any keeper worth his salt would not show these sorts of birds. A shoot would rapidly go out of business if it got around that it was populated by birds suffering from "enfeeblement that results from being reared in captivity".
A mortality rate of 50% from illness and deformity would simply not be accepted by anyone, this is not how shoots are run.
They are released into large pens and then the woods, this is far more space than even the luckiest free-range chicken would have and so I suspect if the above is true, the mortality rate for the same chickens must be incomparably higher. That it is not is telling.
Given that a small group of shooters can kill up to 500 birds a day, many who survive long
enough to be shot and recovered are not actually eaten. According to an editorial in Country
Life magazine (February 1, 2001) some of the 'surplus' is buried in specially dug holes.
Not on any of the shoots I've been on. Sure some birds are beyond eating for one reason or another but the idea that a keeper answering to the estate manger or syndicate captain would bury money out of pure cussedness is palpably ludicrous.
Large numbers of pheasants and partridges inevitably attract – and, in fact, boost the
populations of – predator species such as stoats, weasels, foxes and members of the crow
family. Gamekeepers deliberately kill them through the use of guns, traps, snares and poison.
Species ranging from badgers to cats and dogs – and even protected birds of prey like owls
and kestrels – are caught and killed. Millions of animals are slaughtered every year in these
'predator control' programmes. Because some other species, who do not threaten gamebird
production (such as ground nesting birds), are not persecuted, the industry promotes its
slaughter of wildlife as a vital conservation effort.
And Lapwings, and butterflies and etc, etc. Please documents posted for further detail.
Part of this managing predator population. You will of course have seen the research that came out Israel a while ago showing that roe fawn mortality was in the main ( around 75% ) due to fox predation. As you manage the foxes for the birds, you bring side benefits in for other species.
Of course they are deliberately killed, any man who scores a significant portion of his kills with a firearm by "accident" shouldn't have a firearm.
Thousands of tonnes of toxic lead shot are released into the environment every year by
shooters.
I would be most interested to see the reference for this, banning lead in shot in land seems to be on shaky scientific ground.
The release of scores of millions of gamebirds every autumn presents problems for native
wildlife who must compete for food and cover.
Sorry but complete nonsense, see figure presented in documents and note that these pheasants are usually fed. The feeders feed the wildlife more than they do the pheasants as they are in the woods 24/7.
The production and rearing of ‘game birds’ is not covered by any specific legislation. The
Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes, which was
heavily influenced by the shooting industry, was adopted under the coalition government as a
practical guide under the 2006 Animal Welfare Act (AWA). This Code legitimises the most
brutal form of factory farming – including the use of battery cages for breeding game birds –
on behalf of an industry dedicated to producing millions of birds every year so that they can
be shot down for sport.
• Under Section 4 of the AWA, an offence is committed when an animal is subjected to
‘unnecessary suffering’ and, under Section 9 of the Act, when a person responsible for an
animal fails in his or her duty of care. The suffering experienced by these birds, while they
are being fattened for the kill and as they repeatedly run the gauntlet of the guns, cannot
plausibly be justified as ‘necessary’. Equally, those responsible for the birds are self-evidently
failing in their statutory duty of care.
I would like to see a brief advance this argument in open court.
In Holland, producing birds for 'sport shooting' was first curbed in 1986 and outlawed entirely
in 2002. The action was taken because the practice was judged to be morally and
environmentally unsupportable. Animal Aid is calling for a similar ban to be introduced into
Britain. As a matter of urgency, we are calling for a ban on the use of battery cages.
I would like to see a ban on battery laying methods for birds. It is rather cruel to me to take a creature capable of flight and shut it up in a cage, perhaps more so than pig stalls or other forms of the rural economy that escape the ire of antis because they can't tie "guns" into it.
It appears your objection to shooting has morphed into a discussion on animal welfare, is this a side issue to the demographic question or is it now the main thrust of the discussion?
