FROM PROTECT THE WILD - ANOTHER INFORMATIVE POST

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more 'Enrichment'? Whatever the industry decides it means A short history of how the shooting industry has been left to police itself. PROTECT THE WILD MAY 24 READ IN APP This is the second piece we have published on the subject of enrichment in pheasant and partridge breeding cages - or rather, the lack of it (see Empty Cages, Empty Claims). We are returning to the topic because we believe it matters too much to leave at a single post. The conditions our investigators documented demand context: the history of how this industry has been warned, studied, guided, and left to police itself, and why - years later - the wire cages used for breeding pheasants and partridges remain as bare as ever. The shooting industry did not stumble into its enrichment problem by accident. It was warned. It was studied.It was given a code of practice, a body of government-commissioned research, and years of regulatory expectation. But here it is in 2026 - still putting a block of wood in a wire cage and calling it ‘enrichment’. It knows exactly what it is doing. Farms breeding birds for the gun have always been horrendous places. Almost twenty years ago, in 2008, the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) - the government’s own independent advisory body - published a formal opinion recommending the phasing out of barren cages for pheasants and partridges on welfare grounds. This was not a fringe campaign position put forward by ‘antis’. It was the considered view of the body established to advise ministers on animal welfare science. FAWC’s inspectors visited farms, examined the raised cages, noted the various attempts at ‘enrichment’, and concluded that the barren cage had no place in an industry that said it took welfare seriously. So-called ‘enriched cages’ were found to offer little welfare improvement over barren ones, because, as critics had long argued, it is the cages themselves that are the problem. You cannot meaningfully enrich a wire box suspended off the ground for a bird whose every instinct is oriented towards the earth beneath it. Become a Game Changer Following FAWC’s findings, in 2010 Defra produced a statutory Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds. The report highlighted Sections 4 and 9 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 (causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal and ensuring that the needs of an animal for which a person is responsible are met). It stated (on page 6) that “Whatever the species being produced or reared, or the methods used, the over-riding principle that should guide everyone involved is that all due consideration should be given to the health and welfare of the birds concerned.” The code - now 15 years old - stated clearly that barren raised cages for breeding pheasants and small barren cages for breeding partridges should not be used, and that any laying system should be appropriately enriched. The language was unambiguous. The intention appeared serious. Yet there were two problems that the industry immediately exploited. Firstly, the code carried no direct legal force of its own: breaching it was not an offence in itself, only potential evidence that the broader Animal Welfare Act may have been broken. Enforcement, in practice, was negligible. Just fourteen inspections of breeding farms took place across all of Great Britain in 2020, and sixteen in 2021. There had been no gamebird welfare prosecutions in the preceding three years. And secondly, whether checked up on or not, the industry was satisfied it was complying with the Code. And that’s because the industry itself had decided what the standards should be. The industry responded to the ‘enrichment’ requirement the way industries typically respond to self-regulation: by making up the rules to suit themselves. In other words, the standards on ‘breeding farms’ were defined around what was beneficial to the industry rather than to the birds. What that means in practice is that if the code said cages must be enriched, then ‘enrichment’ would mean whatever the industry decided it meant. No grass, no soil, no solid ground, but a ‘perch’ like the wood in the image above. A laying area. The letter of the code could be satisfied without its spirit being engaged at all. In 2026, what that means in reality is that birds bred and reared to be shot are not subject to the same legislative requirements on welfare as farmed poultry. The gap that sentence describes is not a technicality. It is the space in which an entire industry has operated, largely unchallenged, for fat too long. Become a Game Changer This is NOT what enrichment was supposed to mean We don’t think that the industry has ever taken the ‘enrichment’ question seriously. We analysed hundreds of hours of undercover footage before developing this campaign. In our opinion, we saw breach after breach of Sections 4 & 9 of the Animal Welfare Act. In our opinion, the very existence of these cages is a breach of the Animal Welfare Act. Sixteen years after the government’s own advisers called for barren cages to be phased out, our investigators found birds that had never touched the ground, in cages that offered them almost nothing. But the advice we have received is that, technically, no matter how unsettling or morally indefensible, how self-evident, how clear-cut for anyone looking objectively at this appalling industry, keeping pheasants and partridges in wire cages with just a block of wood as ‘enrichment’ is probably not against the law! Let’s be absolutely clear about this. The system we found is not in defiance of welfare rules designed to protect birds, but is a direct consequence of a system designed to benefit farm operators instead. Can’t change? Sees no need to change. The industry has had every opportunity to change. It has had independent scientific condemnation, government-commissioned research, a statutory code, and sixteen years of explicit instruction. It has responded with perches and wood blocks - not because it misunderstands what ‘enrichment’ means, but because genuine enrichment would cost them money and would require far more space. The economics of breeding birds for the gun do not reward doing it properly. The cage is cheap. The wire is cheap. The bird inside it is the only thing paying the real price. We are convinced that this is not an industry on the cusp of reform. It is an industry that sees no need to change. It has consistently demonstrated that it is unwilling to reform. And that’s because reform is incompatible with the profit margins on which it operates. That is why Protect the Wild/End Bird Shooting is not calling for better cages. Why we are not saying, give these poor birds a bit more space, a bigger block of wood. We are saying that caging wild birds until releasing them to be shot is wrong, full stop. We are calling for an end to an industry that has forfeited any claim to more time, more consultation, or more chances. It had them. It wasted them. The birds in those raised units are still waiting for something to change. On the evidence of the last sixteen years, they will be waiting forever if this industry is left to decide when that moment comes. For more information: FAWC: Opinion on the Welfare of Farmed Gamebirds (2008) Defra: Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes (July 2010) Animal Aid: Exposed! Disturbing new undercover film of partridges and pheasants used by shooting industry for egg production (June 2015). Images and video recorded by our undercover investigator at Heart of England. All of these cages were in use at the time of filming 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. Become a Game Changer 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. Become a Game Changer SHARE LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2026 Protect the Wild Protect the Wild, 71-75 Shelton Street Covent Garden, London, W2CH 9JQ Unsubscribe Start writing