Send one email to save game shooting

The government is reviewing every aspect of game shooting in England. Conor O’Gorman provides an update and urges people to email Defra by 1 November.

How wonderful to read the many emails you have shared with BASC for your submissions to Defra’s game shooting review. Thank you and please keep them coming.

To recap, Defra’s review of the positive and negative impacts of gamebird rearing, release and shooting in England is open until 1 November. It covers pheasant, red-legged partridge, mallard and red grouse.

You do not need to live in England to respond. If you shoot, beat, pick up, work, run a business, or are otherwise involved in game shooting in England, your voice counts.

Submit your experience as evidence

You can change the course of Defra’s review by emailing gamebirds@defra.gov.uk with your experiences of game shooting in England. Copying in BASC at evidence@basc.org.uk allows us to track engagement and help inform BASC’s overall response to Defra.

Not sure what to include? Write about the positive impacts of game shooting – for you personally, for conservation, for farming and for all the businesses that benefit. Your email might be a paragraph or two, or it may be longer. It’s up to you.

Defra is obliged to consider your email submission as part of the review. By taking the time to write and send your experiences, you can help us fight back – standing shoulder to shoulder with those who have already emailed Defra.

To help, we’ve made an email template to get you started. Click the button below to open the template, fill in your experiences and hit send. Your email will go straight to Defra’s gamebirds team, with a copy automatically sent to BASC.

Your stories

We have received copies of 1,500 emails to Defra so far. Around 300,000 people are involved in game shooting in this country so plenty of awareness raising, positive peer-pressure and encouragement is needed from us all.

We have been contacting people suggesting that we use parts of their submission amongst our case studies to inspire more people to come forward. Here are a few examples covering just a few aspects of game shooting.

“Shooting two or three times a year provides something to look forward to during the darker and colder months.”

“Guns travel from across the country to attend our shoot. People eat locally, buy fuel and use local services.”

“On our shoot I regularly see songbirds, migratory woodcock, raptors, mammals, butterflies and other insects.”

“This is our life. It is what my family has known and been involved in for generations.”

“We replace the cover crops every three years, this employs local farmers to drill and seed for us”.

“Nearly all the beaters from all the shoots have gundogs. This requires the use of gundog trainers, vets, insurance, food, dog coats and first aid kit and training.”

“We have red kites and buzzards on the farm which are great to see and shows we are sustaining them. We feed all year thus providing food for all manner of bird life around the farm.”

“I believe it is important that the voices of those who have spent decades participating in and caring for the countryside are heard.”

“The shoots I participate in are integrated with farm management rather than being a separate activity, such as hedges being laid and cover crops maintained.”

“We have raised over £7,000 in the last two years for our local cancer hospice. ALL of the donations and monies raised has been raised on shoot days.”

Spread the word

Some may not have heard our call to action so please do spread the word, especially on shoot days.

All you have to do is tell them to visit our website, basc.org.uk, where they will find all the information they need to get their own emails to Defra by 1 November.

Conor OGorman

Conor O’Gorman has worked in a variety of conservation, policy and campaigning roles at BASC over the last 20 years. A zoology graduate with a PhD awarded for grey partridge research, he has over 25 years’ experience in conservation and land management.