Scaling the game mountain
A year ago, we discussed what was fast becoming a crisis in the disposal of shot game. Has anything changed in the past 12 months?
A year ago, The Field took an in-depth look at what was then an emerging game-meat crisis. Caused by a combination of increasing UK supply and a stagnated european market, with some rather unimaginative game dealing in the middle, there was strong evidence that not all shot gamebirds were being eaten. An essential tenet of shooting seemed under threat, with potentially disastrous implications for the sport in an age of great political uncertainty. Twelve months on, it is time to assess the shooting world’s response.
The first thing to grasp about what alarmists have called “the game mountain” is that in food-supply terms it’s a comparative molehill. In the UK, we shoot about 25 million gamebirds a year; the poultry industry slaughters 82 million a month. And at its worst last season, the proportion of shot game fit to eat but not finding its way to market can never have exceeded single percentage figures. The crisis element arises therefore not from numbers but from absolutes. Just one bad incident of game dumping is enough to hit the headlines, thereby administering a dangerous Pr blow to shooting’s solar plexus.
Sportsmen grasp this, of course, and the consequence of last year’s scare has been a lot of hard thought and action aimed at making sure the bag is properly consumed. It has started with self-help by many shoots. Several that I attended last season were doing things differently from the year before. In particular, shoots were taking greater care of the bag, allowing it to air properly and getting it back to the larder promptly if the weather was warm. They were rewarded by the discovery that game in good condition still sells.
Other shoots were starting down their own food promotion routes. One I went to served mid-morning game sausages – a sample of a new product it was selling via a local farm shop using pheasants from the shoot. Another insisted for the first time last year that every shoot lunch involved game in some form, using the opportunity to remind guns verbally of the need to play their part and I noticed that here – unusually, sadly
– everyone took their brace (pre-dressed) at the end of the day.
There are caveats with the home-marketing route. Once you start processing your own game for third-party consumption, all sorts of game-meat handling and food business rules cut in. The Food Standards Agency’s Wild Game Guide is invaluable here and should be observed. An alternative approach is to involve a professional processing company. One grouse moor I attended gave guns delicious, pre-packed grouse breasts in place of the traditional brace in feather. The packaging informed consumers how to cook them and where to buy more. A brilliant gift for the uninitiated, even if the gun was “groused out”.
OWNING THE ISSUE
These examples and many others like them are encouraging because collective ownership of the problem will go a long way, not just to solving it in terms of getting more game consumed but also in freezing out those few pariah shoots that seem unprepared to go the extra mile, resorting instead to a shameful pit or pyre.
Collective ownership of the problem will go a long way to freezing out pariah shoots
Larger-scale initiatives have blossomed since last year, too. The Country Food Trust has steadily raised its profile, so you may well now recognise it as the charity that produces excellent game casseroles for distribution via those working with people in need. In 2017, only its second year, the Trust comfortably exceeded a target to provide 100,000 such meals.
At the other end of the spectrum, Purdey and Belgravia’s Boisdale restaurant combined forces with others to launch the 2018 Eat Game Awards, an initiative aimed at celebrating all that is best about wild British produce by recognising great culinary achievements and other contributions to the cooking and eating of game.
Another prominent figure in the shooting world, grouse-moor owner Michael Cannon, has recently launched Wild and Game Ltd, a new brand with the aim of introducing the British public to game meat. Focusing on game pies, pasties and sausage rolls, it is also an excellent source of appropriate foods to serve to shooting parties. If you haven’t come across it yet, check out the website.
But the biggest new player in 2018 is undoubtedly the British Game Alliance (BGA). This initiative, inspired by a concerned group of prominent sporting agents, aims to find big destinations for UK game meat overseas, not least beyond the flooded European market. To secure these substantial deals, the BGA says it needs product assurance and traceability, and it has launched a standard for game production, “to cover the marketing of game and ethical issues which relate to consumer confidence”. Shoots must sign up to this before they can benefit from the BGA’S marketing work.
An ambitious and fast-moving initiative, the BGA’S appearance on the shooting scene initially ruffled a few feathers. Did we really need yet another shooting organisation? How would the BGA’S production standard relate to the long-espoused Code of Good Shooting Practice? Where would the money come from and might this put a dent in the fundraising of existing shooting organisations? How could member shoots be inspected and would the scheme be credible?
Many of those asking the questions remembered only too well a previous failure to make shoot assurance work back in 2007. Game management and shooting are certainly not easy things to police but the BGA has been busy refining its proposals and at a recent combined meeting, all the shooting
organisations gave their cautious blessing. The BGA has now been launched and, we are told, will work like this: member shoots will formally sign up to follow the BGA standard, requiring them only to source birds reared in accordance with Government welfare codes and to release their game in densities that do not damage the environment (the standard refers to Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust guidelines on this point); all BGA members should abide by the Code of Good Shooting Practice and must make it available to guns; shot game is to be properly retrieved, handled and cooled... There are 22 such requirements in all.
In a direct response to the “game mountain” issue, the BGA standard says, “All game must have an agreed market before release and before shoot days are planned, taking into account the number of birds you intend to shoot and the subsequent table weight of the fully-grown birds you released.” Combined with an overall “absolute requirement” for BGA members to adhere to their standard at all times, this can only mean that BGA shoots will never kill more birds than they can market. It sounds great but will it work?
Encouraging shoots to sign up to these demands – and to pay for the privilege on a size-related sliding scale – may be tricky. The BGA is relying on fear as its principle driver. Fear of not being able to sell the bag and fear that unless shooting can get its act together on this and in other respects, a future Government might just ban it. Livelihoods and a way of life are at stake, they argue, and this fear factor is stronger now than ever, meaning that the BGA initiative will succeed where previous attempts at shoot assurance have failed. The BGA business plan predicts hundreds of shoots signing up in year one and thousands thereafter.
Some sporting agents – whose profession, you will recall, was behind the plan – have said that “in time” they would sell only BGA compliant shooting. Credibility will be secured, says the BGA, by having a random 20% of member shoots inspected by independent verifiers every year, with third-party complaints being thoroughly investigated in the meantime. For both purposes, the BGA hopes to use the same company that currently inspects farms for the Red Tractor food production standard.
IMPLICATIONS OF FAILURE
Ambitious though the BGA scheme sounds, there must be a concern about those elements of shooting that could be left on the outside if it takes off. Will they still be able to sell their unassured game and what will they do with it if they can’t? The good guys who choose not to join the BGA could lose their game market; the bad guys just won’t care, continuing to bury or burn their bag. There must also be a question mark hanging over the implications if the BGA doesn’t take off. Can shooting’s reputation afford another self-regulation failure? But, negativity aside, the scheme has now been formally launched and we can only wish it well.
So, a year on from this magazine’s last in-depth look at the game market and its problems, where do matters stand? New initiatives, large and small, domestic, national and even potentially global have come into being in response to there being more shot birds last year than seemed capable of being sold. Collectively, these developments must surely make a difference. If the excess in supply last year was indeed less than 10% of total production, and if everything currently in train works out, then we may soon find the game glut a thing of the past. Look at it this way: if everyone who currently eats one pheasant were to eat two, there would be a shortage.
As well as increasing demand, some of the initiatives may well have the effect of reducing supply. The BGA is a case in point; its insistence on higher production standards could well have the effect of de-tuning shoots and decreasing the national game bag. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Success will depend on everyone in the shooting world playing their part. In this respect, it is hugely encouraging to hear a new language coming from shoot owners, agents and, in particular, gamekeepers. The once commonplace tendency to rev up shoots to maximum possible output seems to have been replaced by recognition that a smooth-running engine on sustainable tick-over provides a more certain and comfortable ride.
Often in recent decades it has been frustrating to observe the shooting world’s tendency to shoot itself repeatedly in the foot. Maybe in its prompt and serious response to last year’s game glut we will at last see commonsense coming to the fore. With politics in such an uncertain place at present, it cannot happen too soon.