I really don’t know what to think. I just cooked pheasant, from breasts bought from a small independent butcher in a small shop in a small village in mid-Wales, thinking about a food system of small players and traditional game as an alternative to industrial meats.( I made a lovely stir-fry with nettles and wild garlic, Chinese flavours. ) Yet, if you read this article, you’ll understand all the many issues surrounding these birds, related to general bird biomass, ecology, land ownership, and food supply. It’s chilling that this explosion of pheasant numbers, many more than can be eaten in this market, takes place at the same time as some people pushing for more industrial chicken sheds in the countryside: raising livestock birds for cheap meat, raising wild birds for the pleasure of the hunt and who compete with local birds in waning populations. You can’t drive around here in spring without seeing dead pheasants all over the road. Why did the pheasant cross the road? To make us aware of all these conundra.

Who owns England?

This post is by Guy Shrubsole.

Go for a drive down a country lane and you’re almost certain to encounter a pheasant, most likely as it leaps, kamikaze-style, into the path of the oncoming car. Pheasants are a non-native species in Britain, introduced for shooting; and though we tend to think of them as a harmless (if rather stupid) species, their numbers are now vast – a staggering 35 million are released in the UK every year (20 million of which are in England, as we’ll later see). A recent study showed the biomass of introduced pheasants outweighed the biomass of all wild bird species in the UK. So who’s releasing all these pheasants? What’s the ecological impact of doing so? And who owns some of the estates responsible? Who Owns England decided to investigate.

The ecological impact of pheasant releases

To be clear from the outset: the science…

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