Yesterday’s The Times has a full page on Pheasants being dumped after shooting, and a leader, the second leader, entitled Pheasants’ Revolt too. See video here.
The leader is a curate’s egg of a piece with the sensible sentence ‘Shooting has to be independently regulated and shot birds should be processed as far as possible into meat‘ followed by a sentence of quite amazing crassness, ‘Without hunting there would be no conservation, without conservation there would be no wildlife‘. If there is a literary prize for adjacent sentences being very wise and utterly foolish then the 2019 prize has already been won!
But the article is not news to most of us – but well done to The Times for publishing it and bringing the stench of dead Pheasants and an unsustainable so-called sport to the noses of establishment readers over their breakfasts (and lest you wonder, I was reading the Guardian yesterday and had to have this article pointed out to me by a friend).
The number of Pheasants involved is only referred to as ‘dozens’ (could easily be hundreds though from the video) but it is indicative of a much wider and serious issue.
The Times states that only 3.1 million of the annually released Pheasants (43million, although it is not clear whether the 3.1 million includes partridges too) enter ‘the food chain through government-registered game-processing plants’ which is an interesting if somewhat opaque figure.
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There must be some folk out there, particularly farmers or ex estate workers who could tell us how widespread this is? I suspect its very common indeed. In 2001 while searching a shooting estate near Glenfarg, Perthshire for poison and illegal traps, I found a pit full of poly bags containing hundreds of dead pheasants, with a large digger parked beside it, ready to fill in the pit when it got full. Disgusting but not illegal and no one was interested back then.Lets get interested now!
Just watched the report on East Midlands news.
Apparently the breast meat had been removed, so that’s alright then….
You can buy unplucked Pheasants at our farmers market for £1 each – meaning in reality they are effectively worthless at source.