Shooting Birds In The UK For Sport

 Question: How many pheasants and partridges would you guess are shot in the UK every year? Take a moment to make your guess, and then read on.

Animal Aid says that every year, around sixty million pheasants and partridges are bred to be shot. It doesn’t say there are all shot. Some might escape or die before growing old enough to be driven into the air. Or they might escape the guns and live out their lives. Or at least live until the next shooting season.

WildJustice says that at this time of year, 43 million Pheasants and 9 million Red-legged Partridges are raised and released to be shot.

The Shooting Seasons

The pheasant shooting season runs from the 1st October – 1st February in Great Britain and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 1st February.

In Northern Ireland the Pheasant Shooting season runs from the 1st October – 31st January and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 31st January.

So let’s say there are equal numbers shot in Britain and Ireland (probably not) and split the difference and say the season overall runs from 15 September to 31 January – that’s 138 days.

Let’s say that all the birds raised are shot and that an equal number are shot each day during the season – so that’s 430,000 per day. Is that credible?

How Many Birds Are Shot

Let’s see if we can approach this from another direction to find out how many are shot, starting with how many people shoot pheasants.

The Game Shooting Census and Shoot Owner Census is run by GunsOnPegs and Strutt & Parker. For their report in 2018 they surveyed 652 shoot across the UK. From that they extrapolated to the total number of shoots and arrived at 9,000 shoots and 1,724 birds shot per shoot.

Fifteen-and-a-half million birds shot each year during the 138 days of the hunting season.

Did you guess anything like that number? It is much bigger than I would have guessed.

Lead Shot

OK, moving on from the shooting, let’s look at the amount of toxic lead shot that is blasted into the air.

Let’s suppose that every shot bags a bird. It’s unlikely, but let’s go with that.

GunsOnPegs notes the advice of ElyHawk cartridge maker, with the following recommendations.

For November we would recommend the 12 bore Zenith 30g No.6 and the 32g No.5 which are 70 mm (2¾ inch) and have fibre wads. In the Zenith shells the copper coating on the lead reduces the number of deformed pellets and therefore increases the amount of pellets in the pattern. This cartridge has excellent recoil characteristics and keeps things manageable in lighter game guns. 

A pellet of No.6 weighs 1.6 g. So in 30g there are 18 or 19 pellets. Let’s say 18.

A pellet of No.7 weighs 1.28g. So in 32g there are 25 pellets.

Let’s assume that the shooters use 30g No. 6 and 32g No. 7 equally, and split the difference between 18.5 and 25, and say 22.

So with fifteen-and-a-half million birds, that’s 341 million pellets of toxic lead blasted into the air, some of which land up in the pheasants and partridges and a lot of it that ends up on the ground.

That’s happening each year. What damage does it do?

A study this year reported in Medical Expressthat was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sampled more than 1.5 million people in 269 U.S. counties and 37 European nations. Researchers found that those who grew up in areas with higher levels of atmospheric lead had less adaptive personalities in adulthood—lower levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher levels of neuroticism.