Tomorrow Night Britain Will Be Taken Inside the Bird Shooting Industry
Tomorrow night, 06 May 2026, ITV News will broadcast footage that the bird shooting industry has spent decades hoping the British public would never see.
It comes from Heart of England - one of the UK’s largest breeders of pheasants and partridges for the gun. It was recorded by undercover investigators working for Protect the Wild, as part of the largest investigation ever undertaken into British gamebird breeding farms.
We commissioned the investigation because we knew what was happening behind the locked gate was horrendous suffering and neglect. Now the country will see it too.
We are urging every one of you to watch.
ITV has done its job responsibly and professionally, and we are grateful this investigation is receiving the national attention it deserves.
But you need to understand something. What you will see tomorrow night is a fraction of what our investigators recorded.
A news broadcast can’t show the full scale of what we found in a few minutes.
Our cameras were recording for many weeks. The footage we captured runs to hundreds of hours. We witnessed routine suffering, casual cruelty, and injuries left untreated. The birds at this ‘farm’ lived and died in conditions that would shock anyone who believes living creatures deserve basic dignity.
This is not one rogue farm caught on a bad day. What our investigators recorded at Heart of England is the everyday reality for tens of millions of birds bred for shooting across Britain every year. The industry’s own economics demand it. You cannot run these operations any other way and still turn a profit. The suffering is not incidental. It is structural.
Our End Bird Shooting campaign is going to expose this vile industry like never before.
ITV has opened the door. Over the coming months, Protect the Wild will take you through it and right into the heart of the industry.
We won’t pretend our footage is easy to watch. It isn’t. You may want to turn away. Please don’t. The birds on farms across the UK don’t have that option. They lived those conditions every hour of every day, from hatching to death. The discomfort you feel watching is nothing compared to what they endured.
Make that discomfort the first spark of the anger that changes things.
Tomorrow’s broadcast is the opening move in a much longer campaign. In the weeks and months ahead, we will be publishing detailed footage, legal assessments, and evidence that goes far beyond what any news bulletin will show.
ITV will air the footage at 6:00pm on ITV Anglia, Central, Meridian, Tyne Tees, West Country, and Yorkshire - a combined audience of between 3 and 4 million viewers!
Journalist Nick Smith, who is presenting the programme, will also be LIVE on ITV Central for a studio chat.
The take down of the vile bird shooting industry starts tomorrow, 06 May. Please watch ITV’s footage. Share what you see. Share our socials. Don’t let this become a news story that fades by the weekend.
Subscribe to our End Bird Shooting Substack for much more!
cmJoin 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.
Time all this cruelty was stopped, why the hell anybody wants to go and shoot an innocent bird that flys just once is beyond me, these people are the scum of the earth and things need to be done. Same barbaric idiots that go hunting and murdering innocent wild life (against the law I might add) These people are the scum of the earth and things need to change. Well done ITV for doing this I shall be watching unfortunately I do rather loose it watching such cruelty. Would love to do the same to these vile parasites.
Lead shot has been used for shooting birds for generations, that is a lot of lead shot. This must have contaminated the land. I just wondered if this contaminated land could be a health hazard for wild life, grazing animals and human health. I which case the land should be declared a health hazard and cordoned off.