Born to Die

Inside the Incubators and Brooders on a 'game farm'.

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 (there is no other description for it), 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 - and a word of warning, some of the footage we will be publishing is distressing…

Inside an otherwise almost bare room stand banks of what might look at first glance like something out of a laboratory. Vaguely familiar, but somehow unsettling. A steady hum fills the air. These are the incubators and brooders used by farms breeding birds for the gun on an industrial scale.

Look through the small round window of an industrial incubator and you’ll see something that, on its own, looks unremarkable: rows of eggs. Open the closed door of an industrial brooder and as your eyes adjust you see, in plastic trays stacked from floor to ceiling, thousands of newly hatched chicks - vulnerable, blinking, beginning to find their feet.

Shooting industry supporters will look at all of this and shrug. Nothing wrong here, they’ll say. No blood, no visible cruelty. Just eggs turning into birds, the way eggs have turned into birds for millions of years.

That is precisely the point we want readers to sit with. There is no dramatic villain in this particular footage. No one is hurting these chicks.

Yet.

And that caveat is what makes all of this so quietly devastating. These birds were born to be killed. For ‘sport’.

In the wild, a hen pheasant would brood her clutch herself, leading the chicks out to forage within hours of hatching and calling them back under her wing at the first sign of a threat. That relationship doesn’t exist here. There is no hen in this shed, and there never will be. What she would have provided - warmth, a body to press against, some instinct-deep sense of protection - is supplied instead by a heat panel and a thermostat set to a number on a chart.

What we are showing here is not malpractice, isn’t unlawful - it is the soulless machinery of animal production for the gun.

Scale

The staggering scale of this production (see the screenshot above which shows over 916,000 chicks reared on this one farm by May 2025) is a story the industry would rather the public didn’t look at too closely.

Because this isn’t about a farmer with a broody hen and a handful of eggs. It is about the modern industrialisation of slaughter for sport.

Britain’s shoots and so-called ‘game farms’ now release tens of millions of pheasants a year (with another ten million Red-legged Partridges pushing the total figure even higher). Those releases have ballooned in recent decades. Industry-commissioned research itself puts the rise in pheasant releases at close to 600% over the past fifty years. Shooting birds for fun is an industry that has expanded dramatically within living memory.

And that expansion is visible in the hardware we’re showing here. The incubators and brooders in our footage aren’t the tabletop machines a hobbyist might use for a garden flock; they’re commercial cabinet units built specifically to process eggs by the thousand, with automated turning, humidity, and temperature systems designed to squeeze maximum throughput from every cycle.

Off-the-shelf industrial models on the market today are sold with capacities running into the tens of thousands of eggs per batch, marketed on exactly the language you’d expect from any other agribusiness sector: labour reduction, “economic efficiency”, reduced cost-per-unit.

This is not incidental. It is the deliberate industrialisation of a process that produces one thing only - a living target to be blasted out of the air with a shotgun.

The birds don’t know any of this, of course. Each bird hatches with the same blind curiosity, the same instinct to seek warmth and food and the shapes of other chicks, as any bird anywhere. They have no concept of the calendar counting down toward the day they will be flushed toward a line of guns. Counting down to the pre-determined day they are scheduled to die.

That contrast - between the chick’s total innocence and the finality of what has already been arranged for them - is the real subject of this footage. And we find it heartbreaking.

Reframing the ‘tradition’ myth

Supporters of shooting like to frame their pastime as an intimate, rural tradition - a walk in the fields, a dog at heel, a handful of birds for the pot.

The mass shooting of birds is nothing like that, of course, and the sheds and machines on ‘game farms’ tell a different story anyway.

Some people won’t see anything ‘wrong’, unethical, or immoral here. It’s just machines humming quietly through the night, turning eggs on schedule, producing chick after chick after chick, they’ll queue up to tell us…

But this is a production line, and every single one of those chicks is already being lined up to be shot for ‘sport’. Their short, miserable lives mapped out in shoot diaries, their deaths decided months in advance.

They are cogs in a machine, parts of a huge industry that deals in blood, pain, and fear.

Theirs…

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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.