A PHEASANT or 35 million of them!

This really opened my eyes when I heard it on the BBc Farming Programme!

What would the answer be to the question, how many pheasant are there in the wild in England?

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

 

The answer is around 10 million just before the start of the hunting season and around 45 million at the start of the hunting season.

This is because 35 million pheasant are bred just to lift the numbers to accommodate all those who wish to hunt pheasant. It is agreed that about 60% of the pheasants released avoid the hunters and therefore become "wild" last a year. According to British Association for Shooting and Conservation these are birds "without life skills" which won't survive in competition with the real wild pheasants. Conservationists have noted these pheasants competing for easy food with other birds and providing easy victims for raptors and foxes all of which they claim is effecting wildlife in the UK.

So not only do the UK hunt canned pheasant but they also condemn tens of millions of pheasants a year to an untimely death in the wild.