Now 900+ listings on bloodbusiness.info
And it's all about consumer choice...
Back in July, Protect the Wild launched a new website, bloodbusiness.info “a community-driven, fully searchable website that helps pro-wildlife people like ourselves choose where we spend our money based on our personal preferences.”
As activists ourselves we had long wanted a handy reference list (or database) of individuals or businesses that support the 'bloodbusinesses' of hunting with dogs and/or shooting of birds or mammals (live targets as opposed to eg clays in other words). A pub we might want to avoid, an online business that supports hunting, a hotel that prioritises shooters above pro-wildlife members of the public, that sort of thing. When the wonderful Twitter feed ‘huntpubs’ decided to close and offered their ‘model’ to Protect the Wild, we saw an opportunity we couldn't turn down!
We started off on 24th July with just 64 listings. By mid-August 2024 we had listed over 300 businesses. Three months later we had listed over 600 businesses (and, incidentally, responded to over 800 emails suggesting businesses to list and why).
Less than nine months since we went online, the site now lists over 900 businesses!
What is a listing?
Bloodbusiness.info is much more than simply a long list of venues, retailers, and service providers.
Each business has its own ‘page’ with a pin on a clickable map and a tailored write-up where we explain why we’ve added them and the evidence for their support of a ‘bloodbusiness’. We generally include a clickable image or screenshot. Where we have posts or articles about eg the hunt that a pub has hosted, we include a bulleted and dated list of external links. We add a credit under each post (most emailers prefer to remain anonymous and we always respect that) and a disclaimer. We also add a link so that any business that thinks it shouldn’t be listed to contact us.
Some ‘listings’ are relatively short (eg Broadway Tower (Worcs), others are much longer and more expansive (eg Hurtigruten Expeditions which we listed last week). Most take at least 30 minutes to put together. That’s because we first check the business isn't already listed (if it is any ‘new’ information, it will typically be added and the page updated) and check the evidence we’ve been sent, look for additional information (typically on the business's own website) to see how deep the ‘ties’ go, then write a short (or long) text about the business.
As consumers (which means all of us) we can decide where to spend our money, but only if we have information to base that decision on. Clearly, Protect the Wild is a pro-wildlife organisation. We are strongly opposed to hunting with hounds and bird shooting and listings reflect that. But as we say, the whole point of bloodbusiness.info is ‘choice’, and as we also say, what you choose to do with the information we provide is entirely up to you.
900 - we’re just getting started
Are 900 listings significant though? There are millions of businesses in the UK so that probably depends on whether you have spent months writing every listing and checking and re-checking them (when 900 seems quite a lot!) or you’re looking in from the outside thinking that the chances of your local pub being listed are fairly low, in which it probably doesn’t.
But it’s worth bearing in mind that of those millions of businesses, the vast majority won’t be connected with hunting with hounds or bird shooting in any way at all and will never appear on bloodbusiness.info anyway. The businesses that are listed are the places or the retailers that do support - and are connected with - bloodsports. Every single one we can flag up means more information giving all of us more choice.
And we are already seeing some interesting trends. Just look at the number of pins (mostly listings for pubs or hotels) clustered around tourist hot spots like the three national parks of Exmoor, Dartmoor, and North York Moors. Literally hundreds of thousands of people will visit these areas in 2025 - pro-wildlife folk amongst them. This is information that many of us could use this summer, deciding whether to spend at a pub or stay at a hotel that supports one of the numerous Devon and Dorset hunts or driven grouse shooting.
That’s a surprising number of pins in just a handful of areas, and remember we’re not even a year in yet. As the months have gone on and the site has developed, we are getting more and more information sent to us (for which we are incredibly grateful - some regular correspondents are absolute bloodhounds and must spend as much time looking for this data as we do!).
So are 900 listings significant? It’s a lot more significant than ‘none at all’ and we’ve clusters in some very well-visited regions, but there are undoubtedly many more businesses to list yet! Give us another year and let’s see where we are then…
More to do yet
We regularly hear from monitors, sabs, and activists who tell us that there is a need for a site like bloodbusiness.info. They are happy that the site exists at all, no matter how many listings there are on it - and we should say now that we never forget that it is the monitors, sabs, and activists who are out collecting reports and looking for evidence that makes a site like this possible in the first place (thank you!).
But we also want the site to be the ‘go to’ for activists who don’t want to inadvertently support a venue or retailer or service provider who supports bloodsports.
We’ve been a little reluctant to spend money on advertising until we felt the site was developed enough to ‘stick’, but with more than 900 listings (and more being added almost every day) we feel we’re at that point, especially now that people will be thinking ahead to the Easter and summer holidays and planning weekend breaks etc. So in the coming months we will be promoting the bloodbusiness.info website far more, creating social media campaigns, and putting it in front of as many people as we can. We will be looking to see many, many more visitors coming to bloodbusiness.info this year.