The Savill’s annual shoot benchmarking survey for last season makes grim reading for the shooting industry – there aren’t enough takers for the millions of so-called wild birds that are shot for fun and profit every year. Any pretence that shooting is connected to food is a distant memory despite these words in the Code of Good Shooting Practice
Game is Food: shoot managers must ensure they have appropriate arrangements in place for the sale or consumption of the anticipated bag in advance of all shoot days.
Well, that’s not really what we see now – supply outstrips demand.
There is no getting away from the fact that in Pheasant and partridge shooting (and indeed in Red Grouse shooting) the money is in the killing, and not in the eating of the dead bird. A dead Pheasant is almost worthless in financial terms whereas someone will have paid about £35 to kill it.
And that’s why almost half of shoots were giving away their shot birds free of charge to game dealers and another 12% were paying game dealers to take the corpses away.
According to the Game and Wildlife Review (2017), the number of released (non-native) Pheasants is now (or, actually, in 2012/13) around 43 million birds – something like 15 times the number released in the 1970s.
Pheasant shooting is shooting ridiculously large numbers of birds for fun and then those birds’ corpses are simply an embarrassment to the estates profiting from selling big shooting days. This is what happens in industries, like the game-shooting industry, which are almost completely unregulated.
Will government step in and regulate this carnage in the countryside? I rather doubt it, despite the clear evidence of market failure.
Will the shooting industry clean up its act? I doubt it somehow. But it should.
Photo: David Croad via Wikimedia Commons
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Even when presented with the sympathetic gloss of Savills, that is a telling snapshot of a truly sick industry. When next in discussion with a shooter, it will be gratifying to pull out a survey done *by their own side* and point out these findings. On economics – that the price of shot game has halved in just 6 years, and despite the National Living Wage, beaters get paid as little as £25 a day. On environmental care – a sixth of shoots say they will be dropping out of environmental stewardship schemes next year; and barely half of grey partridge shoots even claim to manage the land for the benefit of partridges. And the passing nod to biosecurity is handy too – to be releasing 43 million birds, raised in enclosed coops, many sourced from overseases, into the countryside every year could hardly be a better recipe for spreading avian disease.
Thanks Mark
You make it sound all very depressing but what harm can a few tens of millions of pheasants really do?
Ok so they may have impacts on sensitive invertebrates and reptiles. And they can do some real damage to the ground flora in ancient woodlands. They could be spreading disease to other wildlife and domestic poultry but the information is not conclusive – let’s just give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Yes, the carnage of dead birds does help to support generalist predators at artificially high levels with consequences for ground nesting birds and many other species. Then there is all that lead entering the environment, but we use it for church rooves so it can’t be that harmful. And should a few birds find their way into the human food chain it’s usually possible to spit out the pellets before swallowing them so no real harm done (though my Aunt did manage to lose part of a tooth once before she got the hang of it).
It’s true that that they cause large numbers of accidents and who knows how many fatalities each year but if people would just learn to drive a bit more carefully that problem could be easily sorted.
People enjoy seeing them and they are one of the most popular birds on our Christmas cards so maybe it’s time we just accepted them as an honorary native species – one of conservation’s great success stories.
Surely regulation would be overkill?
Pheasants kill far more people and have a far greater damaging impact than Lynx would ever have. Yet you cant release Lynx?
If you released a sea eagle…. folk would be looking for compensation for any impacts…yet nobody gets a penny for the damage that pheasants cause?
The law is just a tad skewed.
Circus – just a tad
Pity Keith Brockie didn’t have a video camera on him when he saw a pheasant snaffle down a lapwing chick in spite of it being mobbed by ten adult ones. I do believe that game keepers see a lot of interesting things, but what many choose to tell the rest of us doesn’t necessarily match. More people in the countryside with video equipment and I’m sure we’ll eventually start seeing more of what they really do see too – can’t wait! Re Ian’s point about lead shot I’m sure it was on one of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s River Cottage programs where he went out with a couple of brothers obtaining produce from the Dorset countryside that during the subsequent, obligatory meal he made for them all the conversation got round to pheasant, Hugh joked ‘isn’t it funny after eating it you find a little pile of those pellets at the bottom of the bowl?’ – the bowl not being the one you make cakes in.
We’ve had pheasants nest in the garden. The hens fight over food and unlike the cocks, who just exchange notes about their handbags, the hens actually try to kill each other. They are also very aggressive towards gardeners, who are well advised to carry a rake. They can also run faster than Usain Bolt to catch a vole, but do struggle a bit to swallow them whole. It was quite nice to see them with their chicks in tow on the grass, but the numbers dwindled daily and then there were none. Stoats would be my guess – or other hens, out of spite. Who knows? Don’t get them now – big hairy dog sees them off, when she can be bovvered.