Exposed: The appalling conditions in factory farms breeding game birds for the table

“Appalling conditions”: young pheasants with clips on their beaks

Game birds destined for London restaurants are being reared in appalling conditions in “factory farms”, an investigation found.

Some 40 million pheasants and partridges are bred every year in Britain and often released on to shooting estates around the capital, including in Buckinghamshire and Kent.

They are given food and water to run wild for as long as they survive until they are shot. Many end up on the menus of restaurants in the capital.

But an investigation by BBC1’s Inside Out London, screened tonight, found birds at breeding farms were transported in “appalling conditions” that led to distress, injury and even death.

Appalling conditions at the farms were exposed in an investigation

The programme’s team received a tip-off about one such farm in the South that supplies chicks to shooting estates — and found thousands of birds cram- med together in terrible conditions.

Footage shot by the BBC revealed carcasses of pheasants that had been eaten, plucked or pecked to death by other birds “stressed out” in their crowded pens.

The report said “the stench of death and decay” was “overpowering”.

Dead partridges at one of the farms exposed

Chicks, packed in sheds until they were six to eight weeks old, were found “confined in barren wire-mesh cages” in conditions “worse than allowed under legislation for chickens”.

Further footage filmed by the League Against Cruel Sports shows anti-pecking devices that can mutilate the birds’ beaks and metal cages that “have led to injuries and premature deaths”.

A pheasant farm worker, speaking anonymously, said hundreds of so-called free-range chicks were “routinely crowded into sheds” and “outbursts of aggression were common”. The League’s chief executive Eduardo Gonzales said: “The way birds are factory farmed and transported in cages — is it morally acceptable in a modern, civilised country like Britain?”

Liam Stokes, head of shooting campaigns at Countryside Alliance, told the programme that five years of research by the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs found cages were “appropriate” for birds’ welfare.

He said: “There’ll always be elements of human failing in a system but where it breaches the code we condemn that.”

Defra’s code of practice on keeping game birds says “no specific legislation regulates the breeding and rearing of birds for sporting purposes”.

The self-policing Game Farmers Association did not return the Standard’s requests for a comment.

Inside Out London’s report is shown tonight on BBC 1 at 7.30pm

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