Our HUGE new project is almost here!

COMING SOON: bloodbusiness.info - A new project to help us make informed choices about our spending

Over the last eight weeks or so the team at Protect the Wild has been developing a new free resource called bloodbusiness.info. The website for the project is nearly ready to launch and we are very excited about it!

The bloodbusiness.info website

At the heart of our new project is the bloodbusiness.info website. We describe it as a ‘searchable database to help us all make informed choices about our spending’. And that’s exactly what it is. A searchable ‘list’ of businesses that support hunting with hounds and/or shooting birds or mammals (‘live targets’). Everything from retailers to pubs and hotels, suppliers and digital media - if they support ‘hunting or shooting’ we aim to list them.

We see it as part of our mission to ‘inform’ and ‘empower people to protect British wildlife’: to inform potential customers like us who might want to know that a hotel is specifically geared up to welcome ‘shooting parties’, prefers not to hire a local terrierman to work on their house, and would rather not give their money to a business owned by someone who spends their ‘down time’ hunting animals. It’s about choice, and we think that having the information to make a choice based on our own ethics and beliefs is empowering.

And as with everything Protect the Wild creates it will be 100% free - no charge, and no membership or sign-up (you can donate to our costs if you’d like to, but we’ll never charge anyone to use bloodbusiness.info).

Sourcing information

Now, if you’re anything like us here at Protect the Wild you’ll probably want to know about every pub, hotel, or village store you see, walk past, or cycle past. Clearly, for this project to be really useful we need to list a lot of businesses.

Having said that, we can’t possibly list every business in the UK and Eire. There were more than five million businesses registered in the UK in 2023 and the vast majority won’t have anything to do with hunting with dogs or shooting live targets anyway (at least, that’s what we think but who knows what we’ll discover in the next twelve months!), but we do think there are possibly thousands of businesses that do.

Finding them will take time. In fact, sourcing information for the site is far more time-consuming than you might expect. That’s because we want to make sure that all entries are accurate and current.

We decided not to just rely on scraping blogs and HIT reports from a few years back, for example, because we know that a number of ‘well-known’ hunt meet venues have changed hands recently (the pandemic and tough economic times have hit everyone). And while shooting and hunting media seem to assume that any pub or hotel within thirty miles of a shoot or a hunt automatically welcomes ‘people like them’, we feel it’s only right to be sure.

So we are looking for clear proof and until we find it we don’t list a business.

What might that proof look like? For a start we’re looking for adverts on hunting and shooting websites and reading the web pages and social media feeds of far too many businesses that say how proud they are to offer links or opportunities to shoot down live animals or chase them around the countryside.

But eyewitness accounts will naturally be very important…

Community-driven

We don’t mind putting in the hours of research - it’s very satisfying to turn up some information and add another blood business to the list - but bloodbusiness.info is not about Protect the Wild: it’s about all of us. We know that many of the campaigners, activists, monitors and sabs reading this will have masses of information they want to share with us. That’s why we also say that bloodbusiness.info is ‘community-driven’.

So how can you help?

Information! What we need is the name of the business, its location (town, county, and postcode if possible), its website URL (if it has one), and some supporting ‘evidence’ (a photo of a hunt meet or shoot, or a screenshot of a webpage perhaps).

Send everything to database@protectthewild.org.uk and we’ll do the rest. We’ll upload your data and add a few mildly snarky words of text. If you’d like to be credited with providing the information please say so (we’ll link to you if requested). The listing will look something like this…

This is how a page on the site loads on a laptop or tablet. The entire website is of course responsive (and - in tech terms - ‘lightweight’) because we know that most visitors will be searching for information on their phones.

In the example above we’ve uploaded a licenced image. Most listings don’t have images yet because most don’t have licencable images for us to use, and we assume that if we grabbed a copyrighted one from the website of a business we’ve listed we’d be asked to remove it post-haste! If you come across a listing without an image and happen to have one that you took yourself and which you give us permission to use, please email us (again at database@protectthewild.org.uk).

COMING SOON

We aim to launch bloodbusiness.info before the end of the month, in time for the start of yet another autumn of chasing animals and shooting birds. We want to send a clear message that there are a huge number of people out there who support wildlife and want to know which businesses support killing them.

When we launch blooodbusiness.info, the database and the number of businesses on it might well appear a touch unimpressive. This project was never intended to be wrapped up at launch, of course. We’re thinking much longer-term. What we’ve had built are the strong foundations, now we need to build the house! That’s why we’ve written this post and are appealing for information. We’ll be adding more and more businesses to the database as we find them (or are sent them) for many, many years to come, but we’d love to rock the ‘bloodbusiness’ boat from Day One…

• We absolutely think that between us all we can create something that will be useful long into the future. Giving more and more of us choice about where we spend our money - and we hope ultimately businesses deciding that it’s just not worth the bad publicity to be associated with killing wildlife…

(We’d like to acknowledge the support offered by the team at #huntpubs who contacted us when we first floated the ‘blood business’ idea.)

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As you can probably imagine, building a searchable database like this one has not come cheap. It has only been made possible thanks to our brilliant supporters and the generosity shown in our recent fundraiser! If you like what we’re creating please do chip in a few pounds if you can afford to do so! Together we can ensure this new site becomes a brilliant tool for years and years to come.