Filthy Cages. Mountains of Eggs.

Factory Farms, Suffering Birds — and an Industry That Relies on Us Looking Away

Everything we are showing you in this series of articles - every excreta-stained and barren cage, every sick bird left to lay, every feather-worn pheasant or partridge enduring another season behind wire - leads back to one thing: egg production.

England’s so-called ‘game farms’ exist for a single commercial purpose. Shoots and their clients demand pheasants and partridges by the millions - birds that will be released into the countryside and flushed over armed hobbyists spending a day putting holes into birds for ‘sport’.

To supply that demand, farms across England and Wales produce eggs on an industrial scale. And to produce eggs on an industrial scale at a profit, they keep as many hens laying as possible, for as long as possible, at the lowest possible cost.

The suffering we have documented in previous articles in this series - the sheer scale; the cramped, unstimulating cages; the beak guards routinely forced onto birds to counter the stressful conditions they are kept in; the birds kept in production long past the point where a conscientious keeper would have withdrawn them - is not incidental to the way these farms operate. As we have said many times, it is the logical consequence of it.

‘A vast upstream supply’

The numbers alone convey the scale. Tens of millions of pheasants and partridges are released for shooting in the UK every year, making Britain one of the largest producers of birds for the gun in the world.

The industry requires a vast upstream supply chain to sustain those releases. Across England’s pheasant factory farms, millions of eggs must be collected, cleaned, sorted, and hatched every season. It’s a relentless production cycle that begins in earnest each winter, when breeding birds are stuffed into cages that will be their world until the season ends.

Look at the photographs that accompany this article and you will see that world rendered in its most mundane details: row after row of filthy cages in an egg shed; trays of eggs having that filth washed off them; plastic baskets overflowing with the morning’s collection.

For many readers, the images in this article might provoke little more than a flicker of recognition. Mountains of eggs, dirty cages, conveyor belts, sorting trays, the ear-splitting noise of an industrial shed - we have seen all of this before, in every documentary about chicken farming, every exposé of the egg industry. Decades of intensive poultry production have made these images so familiar as to seem unremarkable. But they are not ‘unremarkable’. They are appalling.

We have accepted the process because we have turned away or stopped looking at it. It is what factory farming depends on. And it is what the shooting industry relies on too: all of us not looking - not looking closely, and not looking properly.

That same desensitisation, the ‘normalisation’ of suffering, impacts the staff that do the manual labour on these farms as well. The workers who walk these noisy and excreta-stained lines every day are not cruel people per se. They have simply stopped seeing anything wrong. The same sheds, the same cages, the same motions, season after season - eggs lifted, numbers logged, lines walked again and again.

Somewhere in that repetition, the fact that the units being counted are living individuals appears to have become beside the point. A bird is kept alive not because anyone wishes it well, but because dead birds mean lost eggs, and lost eggs are numbers missing from a tally. That the system in front of them is built on suffering is not a secret. It is simply, it seems, no longer something worth thinking about.

As long as eggs are being produced, the rest of the process is none of their business…

All for one reason

All of this - the cages, the eggs, the numbing familiarity, the lives spent in cages - serves one end: volume. The more eggs a farm can produce, the more chicks it can hatch, the more birds it can package and sell to the shoots that are its customers.

If they think about it all, the producers who run these farms, the estates that buy their birds, and the clients who pay for a day's shooting regard all of this - the cages, the scale, the suffering - as simply the way things are. Normal. Unremarkable. The acceptable cost of a day's ‘sport’.

Protect the Wild and End Bird Shooting do not think any of this is normal, and we do not think it is acceptable. This is an industry that has hidden in plain sight for too long, relying on the same desensitisation it has cultivated in its own workforce to keep the rest of us from looking too closely.

It is hard, but the way we end this suffering is by looking. Clearly, unflinchingly, and together.

Which is why we commissioned the undercover investigation, pored over the footage, and are writing these articles.

Because in our experience, seeing the truth about this industry - the reality behind the claims of ‘tradition’ and ‘conservation’ - does not create more shooters. It creates more of us.

COMING SOON: What happens after the eggs are hatched? We will follow the process that immediately follows the birth of thousands of vulnerable chicks - and what happens to the males that the industry has no use for.

• Images and video recorded by our undercover investigator at Heart of England in 2025. Cages and systems were in operation during this period.

• 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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