Endless rows of cages: This is the scale of factory farming the shooting industry doesn't want us to think about.

It all starts in rows of cages like this

You are probably staring at that image above right now trying to work out what you are looking at.

Most people will think it is a solar farm. It is not.

This is the Heart of England ‘game’ farm. Rows of tiny cages. Hundreds and hundreds of them, stretching across acres of the Warwickshire countryside.

And inside each one are birds caged for one reason: to produce more birds to be shot for “sport”.

Cage after cage after cage, across an entire farm containing thousands of birds. A systematic, industrial breeding process carried out on living creatures who have no choice, no escape, and no existence beyond their function as reproductive units.

The industry itself states that more than 30 million pheasants are shot each year.

Many people wonder how a figure that high can be true. How can there be SO MANY pheasants? THIS is how.

Millions of pheasants and partridges are factory-farmed like this every year in the UK in tiny cages like these.

This is misery on an industrial scale.

The shooting industry works hard to present itself as a small-scale rural tradition, woven into the fabric of the British countryside. The numbers tell a very different story — one that this investigation will be examining in detail over the coming weeks.

More than 60 million pheasants and Red-legged Partridges, both non-native species, are released onto British shooting estates every single year. That figure has ballooned by nearly 600% over the past half century, and in 2018 alone exceeded 61 million birds.

This is not a handful of estates maintaining a countryside tradition. It is one of the largest annual releases of farmed animals into the British landscape ever undertaken, on a scale that dwarfs the wild populations of almost every native bird species in this country. And it begins with factory farming. In rows of cages.

Video clip: Pheasants in raised cages, Heart of England. 2025

The overwhelming majority of shoots depend entirely on hand-reared, intensively farmed birds to function. Feeding that demand requires a network of around 300 game farms across Britain, topped up by a substantial continental supply chain, with at least half of all birds beginning their lives on industrial farms overseas before enduring long-distance lorry journeys to reach UK estates.

This is an operation with the infrastructure, supply chains and lobbying muscle of modern agribusiness. Yet it has successfully avoided the regulatory oversight applied to every other form of intensive animal farming in Britain.

In the weeks ahead, we will look in more detail at the appalling cages in the images above: the infamous raised laying units — part of a system that could not be described in any better way than "factory farming."

And if you think these cages are bad, wait until we show you what we found at Heart of England. Its owners have taken the suffering one step further: colony cages. Cages piled three high, where birds literally defecate on the birds in the tier below.

For now, though, take in the scale of all of this, recognise the suffering, and remember it.

• All screenshots from the undercover investigation at Heart of England Farms.

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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.

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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.

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.