Over the past few months we have been publishing analysis of undercover footage obtained on so-called ‘game farms’ across England. We began by looking at the sheer scale of the shooting industry, and how the adult birds (not every bird, but far too many) are sometimes treated. We’ve also looked briefly at how enormous numbers of eggs are collected and washed. Now we want to move on to the chicks that are produced from those eggs - and a word of warning, some of what we will be publishing (including the video and screenshots below) is distressing…
Last year, one of our investigators visited a commercial pheasant farm in the West Midlands looking to document the routine mechanics of the shooting industry’s supply chain. We will be discussing more about what they found in future articles, but this week we are focusing on something they weren’t expecting: an open-air skip, piled high with broken eggshells.
As they approached the skip in the pitch darkness, a sound stopped them in their tracks. A faint, unmistakable cheeping, coming from somewhere inside the pile of shell and waste.
Using their hand, the investigator began carefully working through the debris. Within moments, they found the bird that was calling out: a live chick buried beneath the discarded shells of its siblings, too small and too weak to free itself.
The footage below shows the moment of discovery - the kicking and struggling of a small body pushing up through broken shells. What this clip doesn’t catch is the sound of at least one more chick calling out from somewhere deeper in the pile that our investigator could not reach in time.
This chick was pulled free and taken from the site to a rehabber. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the bird died a short time later.
Not ‘just another video’
Our undercover investigators filmed some truly shocking video, but this was some of the most heartbreaking. The vulnerability of this helpless chick, thrown out like trash, will never leave any of us. So much was filmed that made us determined to expose and shut down this industry, but this - this short video - has fuelled our fire for the long months we have been working on this campaign…
However, we want to be honest here about what we can and cannot claim.
We do not have footage proving that other chicks were left to suffocate or starve in that skip, though the cheeping our investigator heard suggests strongly that this chick was not alone.
We are not alleging that anyone at this farm deliberately discarded a living animal.
What we believe happened is, in some ways, worse precisely because it is so mundane: this is what happens when a business model depends on part-time, seasonal labour processing tens of thousands of eggs a week, with no real time or incentive built in to check that every single one is non-viable before it goes in the skip.
Let’s be frank: a system that makes this kind of death routine and invisible is failing these animals just as completely as if it had been done on purpose.
Breaches of waste legisaltion
That failure doesn’t end with this one chick. In the days that followed, a hidden camera filmed Carrion Crows, Magpies, Jackdaws and a Common Buzzard repeatedly visiting the same skip, searching through it, and pulling out eggs and what appeared to be the bodies of chicks and carrying them away.
This matters because an open skip that wild birds can access and feed from is not just an eyesore. Under UK law, eggshells and hatchery waste from a poultry or so-called ‘game-bird’ operation are classified as Animal By-products, and their disposal is tightly regulated for exactly this reason: uncontrolled waste from bird-rearing sites is a recognised route for the spread of disease, including avian influenza, between captive and wild bird populations.
We will be reporting separately, with fuller footage, on what we documented of wild birds using this site.
Swept into a skip
For now, though, we keep coming back to the chick, swept into a skip and spending what may have been hours buried under waste, calling out, until a stranger’s hand happened to find him or her.
That image is hard to shake. It should be. An industry that produces this many eggs, at this pace, with this little oversight of what happens to the ones that hatch by accident, is an industry that has normalised a level of casual disregard for animal life that most people, we suspect, would find genuinely shocking if they saw it for themselves.
The sound of that chick crying out from a pile of shells will stay with our investigator, and with us, longer than most things we film.
But we also keep returning to one uncomfortable fact: had this chick never been thrown away, its future was already decided.
It would have been reared under lights, if a female, perhaps fitted with a beak guard like the hen pheasant in the image above (see Pinned Down and Terrified), moved on through a system designed for volume, and eventually caged, boxed, and driven out to a shoot - before being shot at by people ‘enjoying a day’s sport’.
Dying in that skip was not, in the end, a departure from what this industry had planned for it.
It was simply an earlier exit from the same production line.
That is what we want people to sit with. Not just the horror of one chick calling out from a pile of shells, but the fact that everything about this industry, from the moment an egg is laid to the moment a bird is shot out of the sky, treats these animals as stock to be processed as quickly as possible. There is an awful casualness about this chick’s death that we think typifies the entire industry.
Like so much else we have documented.
We think the public has never really been shown what so-called ‘game rearing’ looks like from the inside - the scale, the waste, the indifference built into the system by design. That’s what Game Changer exists to change.
We’re calling on supporters to look at what we found and demand an end to practices that make a death like this one not just possible but unremarkable. Help us force this vile industry into the light.
As a final thought, perhaps readers will understand this without us saying it, but we are unashamedly pro- animal. Watching that footage made us angry. The kind of anger that doesn’t fade after a second or third viewing. But anger isn’t evidence, and it isn’t what changes an industry - accuracy is.
So we have tried, throughout this piece, to describe only what we saw and filmed, and to be careful about what we do and do not claim.
We have also deliberately not named the farm at this stage - not to protect it, but because we don’t want this story reduced to a single “rotten apple” that lobbyists for the shooting industry will use to distance itself from what we have shown. What we found looks to us like the ordinary, predictable result of how this industry runs at scale, and we want readers to sit with that, not with a company name.
If the tone here perhaps reads as more measured than the moment deserved, that restraint was deliberate, not a reflection of how we actually felt watching a struggling and dying bird being pulled from under a pile of discarded egg shells…
Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator 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.
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.
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This is the beginning. Be part of it.
I joined Game Changer simply because Protect the Wild made me think about the life-cycle of these Game Birds. I've been anti-hunt for nearly 60 years but I confess I had never given very much thought to the birds and frankly I'm ashamed of that. But until today I had given even less thought about the eggs of these birds and this article which is harrowing reading has appalled me right to my soul.. I just cannot imagine how the investigator must have felt and all I can do is to send him/her/them my heart-felt thanks, deepest admiration and respect. I would like every single hunter to be compelled to read this but I guess that is wishful thinking. So my very best wishes to every person here, to all Game Changers and to all at PtW.
"DON'T YOU JUST LOVE SOME MEMBERS OF THE "HUMAN RACE".