Help us end bird shooting today!

About 50 million pheasants are released in Britain each year. Tens of millions of those pheasants will have been bred on what we consider to be factory farms, trucked out to woodland pens and fed through the summer. Then they are flushed towards people who have paid to kill them.

From today, cosplaying hobbyists are pulling on their tweed, loading their guns, and standing in lines while beaters drive pheasants into the sky towards them. By the time the ‘season’ closes on 1 February, tens of millions of pheasants will have been killed.

While avian botulism might be inevitable due to climate change, we must call out the poultry & shooting industries for their role in the spread of avian flu. Bird flu was born in unsanitary factory farms & is now being spread by the release of millions of birds, to be shot in the name of sport.

The birds have died of avian botulism and avian flu. Avian botulism is a disease caused by a toxin in water. The summer's heatwave conditions have created the perfect conditions for the disease to thrive.

Will DEFRA finally call for this vile industry to end?

This beautiful, fragile pheasant chick died a cruel death on a pheasant factory farm. She is one of many who have lost their lives because they were seen as units, products, not as live animals who can suffer. All this suffering so people can get their kicks from shooting pheasants out of the air.

This beautiful, fragile pheasant chick died a cruel death on a pheasant factory farm. She is one of many who have lost their lives because they were seen as units, products, not as live animals who can suffer. All this suffering so people can get their kicks from shooting pheasants out of the air.

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. What the bit does, beyond restricting the beak, is change its shape. We assume the bit’s edges caught against the edges of gap.

This is a 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 frees the chick, she is already dying. Within a short time, she is dead.

On a pheasant farm, a breeding operation exists to produce eggs - and those eggs are laid by females. Most males and birds with deformity or ill-health are killed. They are dropped from trays, usually fully conscious and often with piles of other ‘waste’ like eggshells, into a high-speed shredder.

They treat these chicks so horribly...

A day-old pheasant chick, weighing perhaps 40g, with bones that haven’t hardened and legs not yet reliably load-bearing, is 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 inhumane, yet the shooting industry is getting away with it.

Follow @endbirdshooting.bsky.social and join the growing movement to end the shooting industry. Millions of pheasant chicks go through hatcheries and rearing sheds every year. This will be how a great many of them start their short lives.

He’s tipping terrified pheasant chicks into a pile, as if he’s throwing potatoes onto a shop floor. Our undercover footage also shows a worker picking up the corpses of chicks who don’t survive.

The heartbreaking life of the ‘game’ pheasant begins on a production line. There is no mother to guide or comfort the birds. Their bones have not hardened. Their legs are not yet reliably load-bearing. Workers stop registering them as birds. Tiny chicks get trapped, in danger of being dragged under.

For most of the 20th century, newspapers covered the grouse season exactly as estates wanted: a glorious occasion framed around aristocratic house parties. Today, the most telling shift is taking place inside the shooting industry’s own media and few remaining allies, with their defensive headlines.

The shooting industry kills on an industrial scale to keep grouse numbers high enough for a day's "sport" to be worthwhile. Foxes, stoats, weasels and corvids are trapped and snared in their thousands. Birds of prey are illegally trapped, poisoned or shot to protect the “stock.”

The Red Grouse shooting season opens today. There is nothing remotely ‘glorious’ about August 12th. It’s a date which is synonymous with the killing of birds, the trashing of uplands, and making as much money as possible on moorland estates owned by so-called ‘aristocrats’ or hedge funds.