Piles of dead Pheasants

Mark 37 Comments

 

Terry Pickford has sent me this video of a large number of discarded dead Pheasants found in the Forest of Bowland at the weekend.  It is a shocking sight.

And this follows closely on the report of 10 bin bags of dead Pheasants being found dumped under a hedge in Norfolk.

Words do, actually, fail me.

 

 

 

 

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37 Replies to “Piles of dead Pheasants”

  1. Shameful and a very long way from the cosy myth of healthy, sustainably produced food.

    (You may wish to correct the second link which seems to go to Terry’s video again,not the the Norfolk bin bags.)

  3. Words which are not repeated profanities and obscenities, along with possibly libelous questions on the Game Lobby’s member’s paternity, also fail me.

  4. Send the video to BBC NorthWest, or the ITV company covering that area. Needs to be spread more widely than the relatively closed forum of this blog I’d say.

  5. and for every dead one, how many escape to die a slow death like the one my dog found in a hedge bottom last week.

    Still, a man must have his sport. Sport!?*+#*~^#

  6. And how much land at home and abroad was farmed intensively for grain and possibly soymeal to produce these birds/corpses? Like convictions for raptor persecution this is just the tip of the iceberg. A commentator on RPUK mentioned a wheelie bin full of dead snipe in the western isles topped off with some redwings whose calls had been irritating the shooters.

    1. A redwing and a snipe probably look much the same when seen in the gun-sight of an over-excited city wide-boy…

  7. As I have commented on Terry’s post, it is possible the birds could be game dealers rejects due to excessive damage. However in these cases it is often possible to remove some of the breast meat, however this does not appear to be the case here.
    There seems rather a lot to have come from a single shoot,either unsporting shooting ,hard mouthed dogs, or bad handling after shooting (or maybe a combination ) could be to blame.
    The stupidity, in the current climate of attacks on shooting is breathtaking.
    Words fail me also.

    1. Come off it, this happens all over the country. Round our way the birds are buried with a bit of quicklime or burnt, or left to rot. The people who come out of the cities to play at being ‘country people’ at the weekend are simply not interested in taking these birds home and plucking and gutting them. Don’t want the bother or much worse, to get their immaculate Range Rovers dirty.

      Mostly it’s the beaters taking them home these days and giving them to their friends. What they can’t take is discarded like this. Look at the video again; that wire ‘container’ has been made specifically for the job and it’s brand new.

      And the stupidity in the ‘current climate of attacks on shooting’…? Really? Is it any more stupid than 40 million pheasants a year bred to be shot for fun? 40 million pheasants released into the countryside when we have bird flu? 40 million pheasants eating all that wildlife and natural food that our native bird and small mammal species could be eating? 40 million pheasants eating thousands of tons of grain as well? 56 million cartridges worth of lead sprayed every year onto the land we grow our food on, graze our cattle on and get our water off? A quarter of a million hares shot every year including tens of thousands of mountain hares? Tens of thousands of foxes snared and shot? Buzzards, peregrines, hen harriers, golden eagles all shot or poisoned? Pine martens, stoats and weasels trapped? Heather burned, peat bog drained, thousands of homes flooded every year and all for what? Just so a tiny minority of gormless, pseudo-country wannabes can amuse themselves at the weekend by killing living targets to prove their ‘manly prowess’ with a gun?

      The whole thing is breathtakingly stupid. Dumping the birds at the end of it is just the icing on the cake.

        1. I agree, an excellent summary of the depravity behind this so-called country ‘sport’! It would be interesting to find out if these carcases came from any shoots with licences to cull Buzzards!

      3. You have hit the primer smack on there Peter, best bit of writing on the subject that I’ve read in a long time.
        Those words, together with a photo of this unnecessariness, need to be printed on massive posters and placed throughout the UK for all to see.

      4. Magic – well done especially for mentioning the grain used, a disgusting waste of food to produce waste. Powerful writing!

      5. “plucking and gutting them”

        Sometimes they don’t. They get handed cleaned and frozen birds in shrink-wrap before they leave the gig. Gives the keepers something to do between shoots.

      6. I bid a hundred “likes” on that third paragraph. I’m going to be “borrowing” from it quite a lot I suspect……

    2. Trappit. In the short term, as atrocities like this become more public, the culprits will learn to hide it better. If a stink pit is being used to attract other predators to a trap it will presumably continue but it is very easy to dig a pit and dump carcasses in it. Hill farmers have to do that all the time with their dead sheep.
      Eleanor MacKintosh a board member of the Cairngorms NPA gave the advise to hide the evidence of the Mountain Hare slaughter their.
      https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/cover-up-in-the-cairngorms-national-park/
      The illegal activities are also being more secretive with night vision equipment.
      We are in for the long haul.

  8. As Mark says words fail ….

    Then again I still find it astonishing they leave us evidence like this to report on, what’s their game?

    1. I think they don’t care – nobody seems to have any power to stop them, so there’s no reason to bother concealing anything.

      Peter Martin – your penultimate paragraph says it all.

    2. Most things have been brought up to date for a more modern world, though it seems to be perfectly acceptable for shooting to be left in the 1800’s..
      If all this was a poor mans game it would have been heavily legislated/banned years ago.

  9. Next time it happens someone with a strong stomach and a van they’re about to scrap should pick them up and leave them on the CA doorstep.

  10. This is the lowland equivalent of the Grouse numbers game – intensive shots selling on numbers alone. Many years ago I took action over a shoot on FC land – the issue came to light because the day the shooting season finished feeding stopped & the surviving pheasants stripped the neighbouring village’s gardens bare. The villagers weren’t too happy ! I commissioned the Game Conservancy (in the days it was scientific under Dick Potts) to review the shoot and advise on release numbers. Colleagues reckoned I’d get into trouble with ‘the establishment’. Exactly the opposite happened – with a number of big estate owners I knew thanking me for taking action on activities they feared was undermining the good name of shooting – and of course they were right. It just a pity they won’t break ranks and say it in public.

    1. I overheard a conversation between two older gentlemen before Christmas whilst waiting in the checkout queue at a local farm shop whilst buying my bird food. One of the guys was bemoaning to his friend that he had declined requests from his shooting circle to go out for Pheasant for his 80th birthday and had decided instead to call it a day. His reason which pricked up my ears – he felt that too many younger men were getting into the sport for the wrong reasons and they had little respect for the birds nor the land which they shot over. Following Shooting & CA Updates on Social Media certainly seems to back up this view in my opinion.

  11. I currently attend an agricultural college that breeds gamebirds and permits shooting on their grounds. I know for a fact after the shooting season they have too many dead birds to get rid of and they just end up being thrown away. Such a waste. Bad for the countryside, bad for the wildlife, bad for the birds.

  12. I think that its about time that environmental health started to regulate stink pits. For example…. should a pit be above ground level?

  13. Good evening Mark,
    Just an observation but that pheasant Terry is holding has clearly had the breast meat taken off! Would suggest just carcasses, possibly waiting to be burnt.
    Just Saying, regards.

      1. Ha ha, I’m sure someone will return! Like I said just an observation, breast has been taken off.
        Adieu!

  14. Peter Martin, and Anandprasad, I am only speaking from experience of my own area. Something I have been attempting with varying degrees of success lately.

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