This is so messed up..
Heart of England Staff Admit Colony Cages Cause Suffering
Heart of England markets itself as a progressive, responsible producer of pheasant and partridge chicks for the shooting industry. In recent years, the Warwickshire-based breeding operation has discussed moving away from raised laying units - long criticised by wildlife campaigners - toward a tiered, colony cage system, presenting the change as a meaningful improvement in how its birds are housed and treated.
But footage and testimony obtained by our undercover investigator, who worked inside the facility in 2025, tells a very different story.
When management believes they are talking to ‘one of their own’, the picture painted by Heart of England’s own senior staff is one of chronic stress, failed adaptation, and suffering built into the very design of a system the company promotes as progress.
A Candid Admission
While working in the colony cages shed, our investigator raised a concern with a senior member of staff about a hen pheasant that was clearly unwell. What followed was a remarkably frank admission, the kind that is rarely captured on record.
The senior employee described the colony cage system in terms that should alarm anyone who has accepted the industry’s reassurances about it. “The tiered system,” they said, “it’s not the greatest for them. Sometimes they get bullied. They get put on the wire. They just don’t take to it. They refuse to eat, they refuse to drink, and they go downhill.”
The staff member went further, acknowledging that the sexual behaviour of male pheasants within the confined system creates additional, inescapable stress for females. “You know, sometimes, you know if he’s a bit overzealous and mounting them all the time that can be a bit stressful for them. You know, it’s a different environment rather than just being out in the wild with one he jumps on her then f**** off to find another one and she’s left to it.”
This is not the language of welfare improvement. This is an acknowledgement, by someone who works within the system daily, that it is fundamentally unsuited to the birds it confines.
The Colony Cage Con
In a slick Facebook video, Heart of England attempted to present their new colony cages as a welfare upgrade. Colony cages are larger, supposedly enriched (though we saw almost no evidence of that), and are promoted as allowing more natural social behaviour.
In practice, as Heart of England’s own staff make clear when they don’t know they are being recorded, the reality is very different. The problems the senior employee describes - bullying, refusal to eat and drink, physical deterioration - are not isolated incidents or the result of poor management. They are unequivocally the predictable consequences of forcing wild animals into an artificial, constrained environment they are not equipped to cope with.
For a bird whose natural behaviour involves ranging over large territories, living within a structured flock hierarchy, and engaging in instinct-driven responses to space, light, and seasonal change, a tiered cage system does not become acceptable simply because it is marginally larger than the one that preceded it.
The staff member’s comparison to life in the wild is especially telling. In a natural setting, a female pheasant can escape an overzealous male. She has space, cover, and autonomy. In a colony cage, she has none of these things. The stress is inescapable because the confinement is total.
A System That Cannot Be Reformed
Our investigator put themselves in a situation that many animal lovers simply couldn’t cope with. We found watching the footage harrowing - but at least we could walk away. But the investigator stuck to the task because they knew that were a system of ‘colony cages’ to be adopted more broadly - where birds in the upper tiers are literally excreting on birds below, where birds are dying because they ‘can’t take to it’ - the suffering across the country would be incalculable.
Because what the investigator’s recording reveals is not a farm with isolated welfare failures that better training or closer oversight could fix. It reveals an industry insider’s honest assessment that the system itself - the colony cage, the tiered unit, the entire apparatus of intensive production of birds for the gun - causes suffering that some birds will simply never adapt to.
And look again at the images and the video above. Why the hell should any living being be forced to adapt to this anyway…just so a few hobbyists with guns can stand in a field and blow them out of the sky for fun a few months later.
Images and video recorded by our undercover investigator at Heart of England. All of these cages were in use at the time of filming in 2025.
We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.
End Bird Shooting
Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.
This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.
We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.
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Just another form of factory farming and well done PTW for exposing it. This needs to get on national TV so all those who shoot can see the reality of what goes on.
I expect many “corporate” shooters don’t know the background and perhaps many of them won’t care. However like drunk driving, if it becomes socially unacceptable then less people will do it over time. Keep up the great work.
Like petting farms are to give children a day out where everything is looking spot on, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a similar event was organised to show the lives of factory game birds.
I have see Game Fayre advertised from time to time. I assumed it was clay pigeon shooting and gun dog trials, with decoys .
Adding a display of cages or films of the conditions inside might be interesting enough for spreading the truth?
ME