Undercover footage aired by ITV exposes cruelty at the heart of the bird shooting industry
Our undercover investigation launches on national television
Shooting. They call it “sport”. Dress it in the language of tradition, countryside stewardship, and conservation. Wrap it in tweed and tie it with the reassuring ribbon of British heritage
But what Protect the Wild’s investigators found behind the gates of a British farm tells a very different story - one the shooting industry has spent decades and millions of pounds keeping hidden from public view.
Earlier this evening ITV aired footage from our undercover investigation. We are very grateful they listened to us, looked at our evidence and decided to cover it.
If you missed it or would like to watch again, here it is:
The shooting industry produces tens of millions of pheasants and Red-legged Partridges every year for the gun. Birds are crammed into wire pens, unable to express natural behaviours, suffering injuries that go untreated, living short and brutal lives from hatchery to gun barrel. The scale is staggering. The indifference is worse.
The footage is shocking. Distressing. Already, the reaction has been one of shock and disgust from ordinary people across the country seeing, for the first time, what is done to prepare living creatures for “sport”.
We’ve been receiving emails from people who knew things were bad - just not THIS bad.
But it was far from the worst of it. It was just a few minutes. A glimpse. What ITV showed was just a fraction of the evidence we collected.
We recorded hundreds of hours. Multiple breaches. Across many farms.
“…Sounds cruel…”
Over the past 12 months, Protect the Wild’s undercover investigators placed hidden cameras at half a dozen farms across the UK. What we recorded over months and months of painstaking work tells the same story everywhere we looked.
Suffering on an industrial scale.
The shooting industry has spent years selling the public a lie. That it cares. That ‘welfare’ is baked into the operations.
Heart of England scrambled to release a Facebook post just after the broadcast claiming “Welfare is at the heart of everything we do.”
Nonsense! It is part of a sprawling, greedy industry that has normalised mass suffering.
This is big business, operating in plain sight, propped up by decades of countryside mythology and political cowardice. Politicians from the current Labour government actually describe this system as ’sustainable’.
Tell that to the birds…
“They get stuck and just die”
Over the coming months, Protect the Wild will be releasing many more findings from this investigation.
We will be documenting the conditions, the cruelty, the casual suffering treated as an acceptable cost of doing business.
We will be examining the legal frameworks that allow this industry to operate in ways that would be unacceptable in any other context.
We will be asking why birds that would be protected under animal welfare law in almost every other setting are excluded the moment they become “game.”
“…high welfare standards…”
The industry’s response to ITV’s programme on our investigation was just what we expected: denial, deflection, and a shrug of the shoulders.
But this isn’t about a few rotten apples. We found pain and suffering everywhere we looked.
The shooting industry has friends in powerful places. It has lobbying groups, friendly ministers, and a carefully curated public image built on country fairs and charity shoots.
What it does not have - what it has never had - is a convincing answer to the question of how what our cameras recorded can be described as anything other than industrialised cruelty.
The birds you saw on ITV last night have no voice. The investigators who risked their safety to expose this have given them one. And we at Protect the Wild will not stop until the full picture is understood, the public debate is had, and those responsible are held to account.
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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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Great to shine a spotlight on this. I bet the vast majority of the public have absolutely no idea how game birds are raised for the shoots. Well done PTW and thank you.
Well done lets hope this vile so called tradition is finally getting a nail in its coffin along with the scumbags that endorse this cruelty