How we’re going to end bird shooting

We make difficult demands on the people who support us.

We ask you to watch footage that is hard to watch, to read accounts that are hard to read, and to sit with the knowledge of what is happening to birds in this country every single day.

We don’t do that lightly, but we owe you something else too: not just the grim reality of what we are fighting, but a clear-eyed account of how - and why - we intend to win.

End Bird Shooting is not a campaign built on outrage alone, though there is plenty to be outraged about. It is built on a long-term strategy - one designed to shift public opinion, change the culture around shooting, and ultimately dismantle an industry that has hidden in plain sight for far too long.

We are in this for the long haul. We are as hopeful as we are determined. And we are certain - not just hopeful, but certain - that we will succeed.

But we want to be honest with you: it will take time.

The world we are starting from

The culture of shooting birds in Britain has been built over centuries - not just as a practice, but as an ideology. It has been dressed up, romanticised, and embedded into the national story as something noble. An aspiration for the up and coming, a reward for the industrious, a chance to follow in the footsteps of kings and queens.

To dismantle it, we must first understand how deeply those roots go.

For hundreds of years, landowners have controlled not just the land but the narrative. Shooting has been sold as part of the natural order of country life - something ancient, something proper, something that belongs. The industry has money, political connections, and centuries of credibility on its side.

It has fixed the law in its favour, dismissed opposition as sentimental, and in recent years reinvented itself as a force for conservation - a breathtaking piece of rebranding from an industry that slaughters millions of birds and traps, poisons, and shoots native wildlife to protect its commercial stock. It is an entrenched opponent. Understanding that honestly is the first step toward beating it.

But here is what we have come to believe, after years of thinking about how to make the positive change our wildlife needs: shooting’s greatest weapon is not its money or its lobbyists. It is lack of awareness and public indifference.

A nation of animal lovers — tens of millions of dead birds?

There is a question at the heart of our campaign, a question that has shaped our thinking as we have developed End Bird Shooting: how does a country that banned fox hunting, that funds wildlife hospitals, that has made David Attenborough a national treasure - how does that country tolerate the killing of tens of millions of pheasants and partridges every single season without a murmur?

The answer is that it has been arranged this way, deliberately, over generations.

The landowning establishment does not simply shoot birds. It controls how shooting is understood.

It has presented mass killing as culture, as tradition, as something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. It has cultivated an image that obscures a straightforward commercial transaction: wealthy clients paying to shoot birds that have been bred in cages, released into fields, and driven toward waiting guns.

Ccrucially, it has removed the birds themselves from the moral equation entirely. They have become ‘game’. ‘Quarry’. ‘Bags’.

These words do not describe animals, they describe objects, categories, commodities. The language of shooting has always been the language of othering. Of separation and distance.

The shooting establishment has made cruelty look like culture, and has kept the public just informed enough to feel that shooting was somehow natural, but just uninformed enough never to look too closely at what it actually involves.

Our task - our central task - is to make people look.

What we are doing, and why it will work

We will not win this in Parliament first. Some supporters ask us to find and work with MPs who already oppose bird shooting. We understand the impulse - it feels like the direct route. But MPs who are willing to take this on are, for now, vanishingly rare, and the reason is structural.

MPs respond to pressure. Without a mass movement behind us, without thousands of informed constituents writing letters and demanding change, there is no political incentive to take a position that will draw powerful enemies and few visible supporters.

We must build the movement first. Parliament will follow. Until it does we won’t have the laws we need - or the enforcement that gives those laws their power.

So we will use undercover investigations to show what happens behind the gates of locked factory farms and shooting estates. The suffering, the poisoned raptors, the industrial-scale predator killing. We will use animation and storytelling to help people see pheasants, partridges and grouse as the living, feeling creatures they are, not the commodities the shooting industry needs them to be. We will use social media to reach beyond the conservation world and build a new constituency - people who have simply never been asked to care, and who, when they are, we are confident will.

We know that every investigation shifts the conversation. Every piece of content that makes someone see a bird differently moves the dial. Every person who watches, shares and speaks out makes the movement larger and the industry’s position less and less secure.

And here is what drives everything we do: when people are shown the reality of what bird shooting actually involves, they do not shrug. They do not decide they quite fancy a day on the grouse moor. They reach for their phones, they share what they have seen, they sign, they donate, they tell their friends.

The truth, it turns out, does not create more shooters. It creates more of us.

Photo by Snap Wander on Unsplash

This is who we are fighting for

Why we are doing this is also hugely important. Our starting position is the same for every campaign that Protect the Wild fights: animals comes first. All of us who work at Protect the Wild are proud to stand up and say, ‘We are pro-wildlife’. That is in our DNA. It is how we live our lives. It is what fuels and empowers us.

So - unlike the factory farms, the estates, the complicit clients - we are doing this for the animals. For the millions of pheasants, partridges and grouse killed every year for a paying client’s afternoon entertainment. For the foxes, stoats, crows and countless other animals destroyed by gamekeepers to protect the shooting ‘stock’. For the Hen Harriers, Peregrines and Buzzards illegally persecuted and killed because they threaten a landowner’s profit.

And we are also doing this for every person in this country who feels like we do. Who looks at what is happening in our woodlands, on our hills, across our moorlands, and just wants the killing to stop.

For everyone who knows, in their gut, that this is wrong, and has been waiting for a movement strong enough to say so out loud.

That movement is us. Change will not come quickly. But it is coming. And we will not stop until it does.

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Join the movement. Become a Game Changer.

We are at the beginning of something. Months of undercover work. Hundreds of hours of footage. Farms across the UK exposed. And we are only just getting started.

But investigations alone do not end industries. People do.

We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To stand with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. The first 500 people to sign up will receive a limited edition pin badge.

This is the beginning. Be part of it.