Heart of England is one of the UK’s largest breeders of birds for the gun. On its website, the company boasts that its birds are “produced without any shortcuts” and that it is “justly proud of the way it is produced.”
What our undercover investigator filmed inside its sheds tells you exactly what “no shortcuts” looks like in practice.
A hen pheasant held in one of the company’s tiered or colony cages was found suffering a cloacal prolapse - a life-threatening condition in which internal tissue protrudes through the vent after egg-laying. It is widely recognised as a medical emergency. It is extremely painful. It requires prompt veterinary treatment. Our investigator reported this bird’s condition repeatedly over six days. She sat in a cage with several other pheasants, suffering and untreated, while farm staff did nothing.
After numerous prompts from our investigator, a more senior member of staff - who like our investigator was not a vet so should have referred this ‘up the chain’ - finally decided to act. He caught the bird in an egg-collecting net that had not been cleaned. He removed a stuck egg wearing gloves he’d been using to collect eggs from the cages. He pulled out bloodied feathers with his fingers. Then he poked the prolapse back inside the pheasant’s body using the bird’s own visibly soiled tail feathers.
No cleaning. No antiseptic. No lubrication. No pain relief.
His verdict on the procedure as he puts the visibly shocked bird back in the cage? “We’ll try it, see what happens.” Afterwards he is also recorded saying, “It might be the weight of the egg that is pulling everything out...it might be that eventually she manages to sort of pull it all back in again and starts to feel a bit more bird-like”…
*The following video clip will be upsetting for some, so we have included screenshots too*
.
How should a prolapse be treated?
“We’ll see what happens.” “It might be that…”. Unlike this staff member, we’re not employed to look after birds, but it didn't take us much effort to find out EXACTLY how this kind of incident should be handled. Google 'How should I treat a cloacal prolapse in a hen pheasant?’ and pages of information are returned immediately. There is no need to guess, or ‘see what happens’ - or to get it so badly wrong.
The correct treatment for a prolapse involves cleaning the wound with antiseptic,
applying protective cream to reduce swelling,
and isolating the bird from others who might peck at the exposed, pink tissue.
The industry itself stresses the importance of veterinary advice. A veterinarian would likely need to sedate the bird, safely extract or collapse the egg (ovocentesis), and place temporary sutures to hold the tissue in place while it heals.
None of this happened. Instead, a suffering bird was subjected to an improvised, unhygienic procedure by an unqualified person and returned to her cage in pain and distress to die.
This may not just be a moral outrage. It may be a criminal one.
Section 4 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 makes it an offence to cause unnecessary suffering to a ‘protected animal’ (one that is under the control of man either permanently or temporarily), and requires that keepers meet an animal’s welfare needs. That includes access to appropriate veterinary treatment.
The Welfare of Farmed Animals Regulations 2007 demand that sick or injured animals receive treatment without delay.
The Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966 restricts surgical procedures to qualified practitioners. Under Section 19 of the Act, only registered veterinary surgeons (or registered/student veterinary nurses acting under strict delegation) are permitted to perform invasive medical procedures, surgical treatments, or internal replacements that go beyond basic first aid.
The shooting industry has spent years telling the public it operates to high welfare standards, that its staff are trained professionals. It insists it is capable of self-regulating. That the countryside is in safe hands.
Shoving a cloacal prolapse back inside a hen pheasant is what self-regulation and those ‘safe hands’ actually look like.
The usual denials and excuses
We imagine that the farm will say that this was one (former) member of staff and one incident that our cameras just happened to catch. That this is regrettable. That this behaviour does not reflect current procedures or training. That it should never have taken place at all.
All the usual excuses - but IT DID HAPPEN.
And what’s more, it wasn’t the only discussion of prolapses our investigator recorded. We have clear audio of another staff member saying the following:
“Sometimes the whole oviduct inverts – the egg comes out with the tube still attached – you’re almost as well to kill it, but they’re not easy to catch – you can’t do anything for them – it’s breeding time, these things happen, they go all winter without laying an egg, and suddenly they’re expected to pass one every day – there is going to be some mortalities…when they’re laying at full-bore at the end of April, that’s when the most deaths come...the defects have died and you’re left with the good ones then…”
And yet another saying this on another day:
“Some of them just give up. They get all, they get egg bound. So they try to lay an egg, can’t lay it, they try again, can’t lay it, try again, can’t lay it, and it just kills them. Or they’ll have a prolapse….Yeah, it just happens. It’s part of the game we’re in. It’s not nice, but... They’re like, **** me, I’ve laid too many eggs…”
Those are transcribed quotes. We have edited them to remove repetition, but those are the words used.
Let them sink in for a moment.
In just a few sentences, the suffering of living animals is reduced to a kind of industrial arithmetic, an acceptable variable in a production equation. Animal welfare is not a consideration to be weighed, but a cost to be absorbed.
The shooting industry plays at being ‘conservationists’. It pitches itself as being about rural traditions. It likes to talk about livelihoods and heritage.
But strip away the marketing and this is what remains: animals treated as units of production.
Is this sort of horror confined to just one farm breeding birds for the gun? We don’t believe that for a second.
We routinely describe the shooting industry - from start to finish - as callous, brutal, and entirely profit-driven. This is why.
Shooters, the complicit clients in all of this pain and suffering, have been accusing us online of ‘making stuff up’. We’re not. This is just a fraction of the evidence we have gathered to prove we are neither exaggerating nor lying.
THIS IS THE REALITY. THIS IS FACT.
Images and video recorded by our undercover investigator at Heart of England 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.
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.
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.
Breeding animals to be living targets! , this would not be allowed in any decent society, it seems obvious that Governments who enable Genocide have scant regard for animal suffering.
What an absolutely horrific thing to do even in the name of trying to help the bird !!! Disgusting animal abuse !