New welfare rules on game birds are shot down

Outside the game bird business, most people probably missed one of the first significant moves by the new team at the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs. Within days of being appointed, farming minister James Paice recalled a Code of Practice for the Welfare of Gamebirds Reared for Sporting Purposes which was one of his predecessor's last flings and was due for ratification by Parliament this autumn.

It was called "a dog's dinner" by the gamekeepers' association and most other interested organisations. A farmer wrote to the Yorkshire Post to say it would give his partridges more space per ounce of bodyweight than he and his wife had in their bungalow in Pickering.

Interestingly, the British Association for Shooting & Conservation – effectively the sporting gun club – stood alongside the animal welfarists in welcoming it.

It turned out it was the BASC's attack on factory farming methods creeping into its sport which had persuaded Defra to tighten the code at the last minute. It was a surprising split in the usual rural alliance against New Labour, and the BASC has suffered some cancelled subscriptions because of it.

Jim Paice had been promising for a long time that if he got into Defra, he would put an end to the "gold-plating" of British animal welfare law, ahead of European requirements. And the gamebird code was, well, a sitting duck for a symbolic first shot.

Like almost everything else, the trade in pheasant and partridge eggs and young is nowadays international. If British standards put up prices, somebody can airfreight us a cheaper version in hours – from France, Spain, Denmark, even America. That is why Mr Paice stepped in. But a new version of the code is under discussion already. The business is just too big to be left alone and the UK tradition of the "driven shoot" – where the hunters sit down while beaters and retrievers do the work – is at the heart of it.

Now that city boys and working men have added it to their list of hobbies, it requires as many young pheasants as the eggs industry needs laying hens.

Jamie Horner, the son of a welder, understands what is going on better than most. He was shooting pigeons and rabbits with his uncles from the age of 13, growing up at the Chapeltown end of Sheffield. He became a forester on the old Fitzwilliam family estate at Wentworth, South Yorkshire, and a country man for life – wise to the different way the world works where a brace of warm mallard is still an acceptable tip and the lads email each other with recipes for snipe and Canada goose.

Nowadays, he works part-time on power station refits, making good money for hot and dirty work. But he still lives on the estate – and keeps up his contacts off the beaten track by dealing in game feed for the BOCM Pauls company. He sells a thousand tonnes a year of their market-leading brand, Marsdens, and knows a dealer in Lincolnshire who moves six thousand.

Everyone is hard to pin down when it comes to prices, which all depend on the deal. But we can reckon an average of 300 a tonne. That means there is 60m worth of business nationally just in the "chickenfeed".

But the recession is biting. One shoot in Derbyshire has folded after losing its Russian custom, according to the grapevine, and BOCM has started producing a budget version of its feed, branded Perdix, for keepers for the cost-conscious end of the market.

Everyone has cut back on gamekeepers, so foxes and crows flourish. And the law protects sparrowhawks and badgers. Ground-nesting birds – lapwings and curlews, partridge and pheasant – suffer proportionately.

There are shooters who will fly to Argentina to shoot thousands of doves in a day. They get their satisfaction from numbers, in the avian equivalent of match-fishing - although they will probably swap an entire bag for a couple of ready-plucked birds to take home. One way and another, gamebirds for UK shooting are being cage-reared in millions. Almost all the pheasants you see were probably brought up that way. A truly wild one has become quite a rare thing.

Jamie Horner takes me to see Neil Swinn, gamekeeper on the Wentworth Park shoot – run on a lease from one of the trusts which administer the Fitzwilliam inheritance. It has 2,800 acres of pheasant, partridge and duck, and will host two or three shooting parties a week between the beginning of September and the end of January. The date everybody knows as the start of the grouse season, August 12, is actually a bit early for any bird born in the same year. There is, of course, nothing to be shocked about on Mr Swinn's patch – especially if you have seen a commercial chicken shed. His pheasant poults, bought in from Wales as day-olds, are clean and healthy and mostly running on grass even before they are let out of their pens to mature in a fenced wood. He buys in partridge at eight weeks old, to go into the maize and kale fields set aside for them. Most are French partridge but he releases some of the smaller and prettier English sort – and tries to protect them from the guns – as a contribution to conservation.

Grouse are a very small part of the game farming business. They are generally said to be "impossible" to farm but Mr Horner, who runs a bit of grouse moor in Derbyshire as a sideline, knows a man near Aberdeen who does it.

He says: "He has to spend half the day collecting young heather and blueberries and so on to feed them with, because there is no artificial alternative which does not ruin their digestive systems. But he can sell them for 150 a pair, or up to 300 a pair if he can get black grouse."

That is, in fact, about the cost of shooting grouse, although Mr Horner and his mates do it cheaper on their Derbyshire stakeholding, by settling for small bags and not using beaters at 40 a head. The full Monty on a neighbouring Derbyshire estate costs 30,000 plus VAT for eight guns for two days.

Pheasant are less exclusive. You can have a couple of hundred brace between eight to ten guns for about 600, or double that, depending on location. At the other end of the market, a day among wood pigeon could be as little as 100, or free if you know the landowner.

We stop by the Wentworth lakes to see kingfishers and then go for a cup of tea in Mr Horner's garden, where the outhouses all have holes for swallows.

"I know it seems odd to be a birdwatcher and a shooter," he says. "But it is all part of the same thing for me. It is because of the shooting that all this land is still here, undeveloped and not even farmed intensively."

Jamie Horner: 07812 241864 or jamie.horner@ talktalk.net

For shooting at Wentworth call Lee Gouldthorpe 0777 4268738.

CW 17/7/10