The Times reports today that Eurotunnel is the last remaining route into the UK for millions of French-bred Pheasant chicks after ferry companies boycotted the imports. From The Times report (by Will Humphries) it appears that Eurotunnel was unaware of the numbers of live birds being imported on 3.5 tonne trucks and that animals are not allowed on the company’s freight service.
The Hunt Saboteur’s Association filmed the conditions under which Pheasants are reared by the French companies exporting Pheasants and partridges to the UK and showed that at least in some cases these were not compatible with UK standards. The Times quotes Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance as saying that the British Game Alliance was ‘looking at’ adopting a standard under which its members would source imported birds from farms with standards as high as UK farms which appears to be an admission that that is not the case at the moment.
This blog asked Defra back in 2014 how many live Pheasants and partridges were imported to the UK and the answer was about 8 million. A parliamentary answer in 2016 put the figure a bit lower at around 6 million lives birds (plus millions of eggs).
An industry that releases 43 million Pheasants into the UK countryside each year, so that c14 million can be shot, depends on the import of millions of live birds reared abroad under conditions that would not be allowed in the UK. And Eurotunnel is now the main route into the UK for these imports. Eurotunnel (Getlink) have a Contact page on their website.
[registration_form]
Many of these birds are reared in conditions similar to the cages that have been outlawed for laying hens. Pheasants have a wide repertoire of behaviour that is comprehensively thwarted by cage confinement. The shooting fraternity’s hubristic assertion that pheasants are natural, wholesome and far superior to farrmed poultry is wrong. It is a big, fat lie.
Surely any shoot that releases these things into the Wild. has no requirement under any general licence to control corvids and probably stoats weasels.
The number of chicks produced by any surviving females would be insignificant so they can’t be suffering severe financial damage.
The females produced by this system, which are kept or escape shooting and are possibly ( traditionally) caught up to breed again by indigenous British breeders, will be pretty useless at the job. no natural selection having taken place over previous generations.
We see good examples of their useless nesting and rearing behaviour in our large garden.
Re buzzard kills of live birds: During release round here there so many hit on the road that I don’t suppose the buzzards waste a lot of time trying to catch live birds.. They are then legally wild anyway so they can just net the rearing pens. Job done and no need for a licence.