Nasty, brutish and short lives
THE 'animal loving' British public has thoroughly rejected the battery farming of chickens, and yet the similar mass breeding of pheasants continues to go unreported, Pheasants are major earners, Gazette, June 16.
Over 40 million game birds are reared every year to be used as live targets for this 'sport', and they often spend the early part of their lives in cages worse than those allowed for chickens.
The game industry would have you believe that their meat is 'wild' or 'natural'; the League Against Cruel Sports has demonstrated that the reality is farmed birds in hellish conditions and all so that people who think it's acceptable to kill for fun can engage in their perverse activity.
Your readers should be under no illusions: the alleged £32m contribution to Exmoor's economy is at the expense of the welfare of these birds.
IVOR ANNETTS League Against Cruel Sports Tiverton
Comments
by Jon Burgess, Worcestershire
Saturday, June 27 2009, 10:44PM
“Mr Annetts does a wonderful job of exposing just how little if anything he knows about game rearing and shooting .
To begin with young pheasants do not spend anytime in cages
like those used for battery hens which produce eggs.
There are only about three game farms in the UK which use a battery system to produce pheasant or partridge eggs. The birds in these cages are mature birds at least twelve months old. They only remain in the cages for a few months. This system for egg production is likely to be phased out voluntarily in the near future anyway.
Young pheasant or poults are ready to released at six to seven weeks old so keeping them in cages would be totally counter productive in rearing strong healthy birds. Normally pheasant chicks are placed in small rearing
sheds with a heater food and water. At about three to four weeks old they are able to venture outside in a grass run where they grow rapidly while still having the shelter of the rearing shed.
Mr Annetts should note that the average chicken produced for meat is killed at about forty two days old at the same time the pheasant is off to the woods to be slowly released into the wild. Finally while one hundred percent of the chickens will end up on the dinner plate only about forty five percent of pheasants will be shot.
Mr Annetts needs to start dealing in the reality of the facts rather than smoke and mirrors, propaganda and spin, but then his whole anti-shooting campaign would fall apart !”