The UK Government is poised to open a public consultation on the welfare implications of the mass breeding of gamebirds, according to an article published by The Guardian this afternoon (see here).
This consultation has been anticipated, after the Labour Government included it in its Animal Welfare Strategy which was published in December 2025 (see here).
What isn’t clear, to me anyway, is whether this consultation also includes evidence-gathering for the option of licensing gamebird shooting and releases, which was promised separately in the Government’s Land Use Framework for England, published in March this year (see here).
Today’s article in The Guardian jumps seamlessly between the two issues and gives the impression of a single consultation covering both issues, rather than two separate consultations.
I couldn’t find any notice of a consultation on Defra’s website, so I guess the announcement is imminent and we’ll find out the extent of it when it’s actually published.
I was invited to provide a comment for The Guardian‘s piece today. I told the journalist that yes, there is plenty of evidence documenting the failure of animal welfare considerations for the mass breeding and rearing of gamebirds and it is definitely worthy of attention for the benefit of those individual birds. However, I also pointed out that addressing those welfare concerns was a bit like treating the symptoms but not the cause.
Putting an end to the rearing and annual release in to the countryside of an estimated 60 million non-native game birds for shooting should be the government’s focus. If they stopped that, then the associated welfare issues, as well as the many environmental issues and wildlife crimes associated with the gamebird shooting industry would also be sorted.
The Guardian article can be read here.
Raptor Persecution UK 