Left to rot in a field: Pheasants dumped after day’s shooting
SHOOTING enthusiasts like to justify their sport by saying they are simply bagging birds for the pot.
But this pile of dead pheasants left to rot in a field tells a different story.
A shoot at an exclusive country estate was branded by campaigners as ‘target practice with living creatures’ after around 30 birds were found dumped at a roadside afterwards.
Ed Shephard of the League Against Cruel Sports, who took undercover pictures across Britain during the shooting season which ended on February 1, said it was unlikely anyone was coming back to collect the birds at Maesmawr Hall, mid-Wales.
‘As the shooting party left, our investigators found these birds dumped on the side of the road just before it got dark,’ he said. ‘What people are allowed to do to pheasants would be illegal to do to any other farmed animal. It’s an industry solely set up for profit, not for producing food.’
League chief Eduardo Gonçalves said the public was fed an image of ‘a stroll in the coun-
‘It’s senseless and disgusting’
try, a bird flying overhead, a couple of shots and bang, there’s your dinner. Instead, this is little more than target practice with living creatures.
‘People are starting to understand what “canned hunting” is in Africa – lions are raised simply to be released into a con- fined area then shot. Game-bird shooting is our own canned hunting. It’s just as senseless and just as disgusting.’
Game is newly popular thanks to TV chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. Campaigners say 100,000 birds are shot per day in the season.
Under a Countryside Alliance shooting code each ‘gun’ taking part in a shoot should take home a ‘brace’ (two birds) with the rest sold off by the estate. Alliance head Liam Stokes said 2014 figures showed ‘97 per cent of all game that is shot goes into the human food chain’.
He added: ‘Any incidences of dumping birds are few and far between and deserve nothing but condemnation’.
Maesmawr Hall is part of the Bettws Hall group, which raises seven million pheasants a year for shooting, No one was available for comment yesterday.