The shooting industry, under registering, and Avian Flu

Shooting's arrogance is unforgiveable

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

It’s taken a series of Freedom of Information requests (FOIs), but campaigner and author Guy Shrubsole has been able to reveal on his excellent ‘Who Owns England’ blog that the shooting industry is failing to declare millions of Pheasants that are being bred, reared and released into the countryside to be shot. (If you haven’t read ‘The Lie of The Land’, Guy's excoriating take-down of the system of land ownership and the environmental catastrophes it has led to, we highly recommend it.)

According to ‘Latest pheasant release stats point to widespread rule-breaking by shooting estates’

“25.9 million pheasants are currently being bred, reared or released in England, according to the latest official statistics I’ve obtained via a Freedom of Information request to the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). The figure points to widespread rule-breaking by shooting estates who are failing to even register gamebird numbers – since it’s far lower than the number of pheasants the shooting industry accepts are present in the countryside.”

The industry itself acknowledges that some 50 million Pheasants (and up to 10 million Red-legged Partridges and 1perhaps as many as 2.5 million Mallards) are tipped out into the countryside every year. Prior to being released they are held in inappropriate cages, are being fitted with cruel beak guards far in excess of welfare experts’ recommendations, and the industry itself expects around 10% of birds will die before they even get to be the ‘wild birds’ shooters claim to enjoy killing.

Non-compliance on a massive scale

We mention those issues because we have evidence, and because Guy goes on to say that “it once again demonstrates the depth of non-compliance by shooting estates with basic regulatory requirements.”

By law, it is a requirement for anyone keeping 50 or more birds, including Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges, to register with APHA (the Animal and Plant Health Agency). The GOV.UK website states that “You must register within one month of keeping poultry or other captive birds at any premises in England or Wales”.The registry was originally set up for poultry keepers and designed to help APHA manage the spread of diseases such as Avian Influenza (Bird Flu). It most definitely includes the shooting industry and the vast numbers of birds it now farms.

Failure to register with APHA is an offence, but the industry has been sidestepping what is a piddling legislative burden for years. A joint Natural England and BASC report stated in 2020 “it appears from our review that there is poor compliance with the Poultry Register’ and that “if the estimate of Aebischer (2019) is correct, then this suggests a compliance level with the required poultry register of <25%”. How much less is not specified, but we regularly see suggestions that it may be around 20%.

Even parts of the industry itself have warned that non-compliance has serious risks. Back in 2023 the head of the Game Farmers Association, George Davis wrote: “please, please register on the poultry register… Laws can be seen as a burden but it is there to help, and it does apply to all shoots and game farms with over 50 birds penned or released, I think I can say that must be 99.99 % of us.”

His pleas - like most sensible pleas made to the shooting industry - appear to have fallen on deaf ears…

The scale of some pheasant farms has to be seen to be believed

Avian Flu

Whether the industry is collectively stupid or collectively arrogant is difficult to say (we suspect the latter, as it has always attracted farmers and landowners who think they know best and loathe what they perceive as ‘interference’ in how they manage their operations), this level of non-compliance is unforgivable in the face of the very real threat posed by H5N1 Avian Influenza.

A disease originating in large and unhygienic poultry sheds in East Asia (where virus-laden chicken faeces were routinely sluiced away into streams which fed into lakes containing large numbers of migratory waterfowl), the virus has spread globally, affecting wild birds, chickens, and even mammals (including seals, sea otters, dolphins, foxes, and polar bears). In September 2024, scientists warned that the virus presented “an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity”, with the risk to humans rising as it continues to leap the species barrier, reaching new host species.

In the last couple of years Avian Flu has ripped through wild birds here in the UK and has been particularly rife amongst seabirds because they tend to breed in tightly-packed colonies where the virus easily spreads in nasal secretions and excreta (another reason that the appalling decision by NatureScot to licence a hunt of young gannets this year is so utterly wrong).

Why non-compliance risks worsening the spread of Avian Flu

If the shooting industry could be bothered to work with APHA, then during disease outbreaks the Agency would be able to quickly contact registered keepers to provide information and guidance on biosecurity updates. If APHA doesn’t even know where birds are - or how many of them there are - it’s clearly impossible to implement targeted surveillance and control measures.

Yet, as we have written previously, the shooting industry seems content with shoving its metaphorical fingers in its metaphorical ears - while it shoves two fingers up at the country’s wild birds and the rest of us.

The threat of Avian Flu has been known for years. Taking precautions would seem obvious, but first-hand reports we have received suggest there are barely even any pre-emptive biosecurity measures like disinfection mats on pheasant farms (please correct us with evidence if we’re wrong, we’d be relieved to see it) and pheasants are right now being held in huge, unroofed pens prior to being released.

At the same time, the country is bracing itself for widespread Avian Flu outbreaks. There have already been recent major outbreaks, as Raptor Persecution UK outlined a few days ago. In July alone there were four more, resulting in the mass killing of both captive poultry and young pheasants. In one case, 2,500 Pheasant poults on a Pheasant shoot near Winsford in Exmoor National Park were killed. In another serious outbreak just outside Wrexham, over 45000 pheasants were killed and (according to local residents) a police cordon was thrown around the estate to stop - depending on how you read the situation - people getting in or the truth getting out.

Every outbreak should mean 3km Protection Zones and 10km Surveillance Zones being put in place. These (in theory at least) would prevent the release of birds for shooting.

Perhaps that explains the under-registering?

Whose fault? The industry, the government, and the customer…

So who is to blame for non-compliance and the risk of a disastrous spread of a disease that could not only tear through millions of pheasants but also the wild birds and mammals they come into contact with?

We’re all to blame for falling for the lie that some birds (‘gamebirds’) are bred to die and we shouldn’t worry about them too much, but firstly, it is primarily and undoubtedly the industry’s fault. It is entirely selfish and as arrogant as industry gets (and it faces stiff competition from the likes of the petrochemical and tobacco giants). It has fought against all attempts to rein it in, while moaning about how regulated it thinks it is. Money matters more than adherence to guidelines and considerations of wild birds. Always has and always will.

Secondly, the government (going back generations) is to blame. From the land owning ‘aristocrats’ in the Lords and the Conservatives who queued up to protect shooting interests all the way to the current Labour government which has deemed shooting ‘sustainable’, the politicians have allowed the shooting industry to expand like a cancer across the countryside. They have allowed self-regulation and unenforced Codes of Practice to be the norm, batted away sensible restraints on behalf of lobby groups, and condemned millions and millions of birds to die for ‘fun’.

And thirdly, it is of course shooting’s complicit clientele, the ‘shooter’, who has to accept responsibility for the misery the industry causes and may now be about to unleash. Without the customer, the industry would cease to exist. Without the client willing to look the other way when evidence of raptor persecution is presented to them, when the dangers of Avian Flu are explained to them, when the miserable conditions at pheasant farms are shown to them, the industry would die. Whatever harm is done, is done because a minority of people are still queuing up to slaughter the industry’s ‘product’.

Guy Shrubsole states in his blog that “Given the widespread ecological impacts of pheasants (on woodland ground flora, hedgerow structure, pheasant predation of insects / lizards / adders, boosting mesopredator numbers etc) and given pheasants’ role as a vector for bird flu, it is absolutely essential that pheasant shoots are compelled to register rearing and releasing numbers.”

We would argue that is also essential that they are compelled to STOP. Stop the miscounting, stop the non-compliance, stop the law-breaking. And stop the killing. Just STOP…