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 It's the perfect day for shooting. The early morning mist burns slowly off the hillsides of mid-Wales and the sun reflects from a million tiny dew drops.
High in the mountains of Montgomeryshire, the song of distant gunfire echoes across the wilderness. The shooting season is in full swing and a dozen tweed-clad men blast away at flocks of fluttering pheasant and partridge. It's a scene that's as much a part of the autumnal countryside as frosty mornings and a glowing log fire.
Game shooters are drawn to the sport by the ideal of man against wild nature. But the Daily Mail can reveal the hidden truth behind Britain's game shooting industry: the birds are now "farmed" in battery cages. Supposedly "wild" birds are bred on an industrial scale ready to serve as little more than feathered target practice for clients willing to pay thousands of pounds for the privilege.
Our investigation has discovered that up to nine pheasants are forced to share cages no larger than a typical office desk. The birds are so distressed by captivity that they repeatedly smash their heads against the roofs of their tiny cages. Other birds peck out each other's feathers in frustration. Many have their heads encased in steel or plastic masks to help preserve their beautiful plumage, which is much prized by game shooters.
Battery pheasant farming is spreading rapidly through the industry and has now begun to anger traditional game shooters who believe that it's bringing the whole sport into disrepute. They fear that it may lead to a ban on shooting by a Labour government keen to appease the animal rights' lobby.
"We think that this system of producing birds is incompatible with our sport and its values," says Stewart Scull, spokesman for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. "We want birds that are fit, healthy and adapted to the wild, not ones that come from an intensive production system."
Others go even further. Robin Page, former presenter of One Man And His Dog and passionate defender of shooting and fox-hunting, says: "The relationship between the hunter and the bird is disappearing. They're turning the birds into live targets. It's unnatural and morally wrong."
Bettws Hall is typical of the new breed of sporting estate. Nestling in the hills of Montgomeryshire, about twenty miles from Shrewsbury, it is the quintessential shooting establishment. Fountains and a crystal clear trout pool greet visitors as they sweep along the gravel drive leading to the shooting lodges. Guests are promised the best of everything. The finest beef, venison and game are on the menu. Wines from around the world brush shoulders with hearty local ales.
On a typical Saturday evening, the bar is filled to bursting with tweed and Barbour-clad ‘guns' chatting about their day's exploits. After a fine day's shooting in great company, the guns could be forgiven for believing that they'd spent a traditional weekend in the country.
But behind this façade lies the reality of Bettws Hall. Just a few minutes walk from the luxurious shooting lodges, and hidden behind thick hedgerows and steep earth banks, lie row upon row of battery cages. These can house around 15,000 breeding pheasants.
On a summer's evening the birds' anguished cries fill the air. Up to nine pheasants are crammed into a cage measuring just six feet by four. There are no perches to sit on or straw to curl up in, just bare alloy walls and a wire mesh floor. They are little different to the cages used to produce cheap chicken for the freezer.
The "wild" birds in the Bettws Hall factory farm can suffer terribly in their cages. Huge numbers are attacked by other birds desperate to relieve their pent-up stress and aggression. Some were so severely pecked that their beautiful multi-coloured plumage had become torn and ragged. Their backs and necks were bare and bloody. Their vivid red eyes dimmed by hopelessness.
To try and stem the rising tide of injuries, the game-keepers had fitted face masks to many of the birds. These masks supposedly stop the birds from pecking each other. It's debatable whether they work or not, but they must certainly add to the discomfort, disorientation and suffering of the pheasants.
At Bettws Hall, birds that would naturally roam hedgerows and wooded glades have been imprisoned in barren metal cages and their faces encased with plastic.
Other battery pheasants had been "scalped". Pheasants find life so confusing in the cages that they repeatedly fly at the nets covering their pens in a desperate bid to escape. This netting can cut deep into their delicate skin and feathers, leaving them raw and running with blood.
Despite these injuries, Gwyn Evans, co-owner of the company behind Bettws Hall, claims that he strives constantly to improve his birds' welfare. "This is a new system," he says. "And we're working hard to make it better for the birds. Next year we'll make sure that 25 percent of the floor space is covered with dust so they can express their natural behaviour. They will also have a nest box to lay in."
Gwyn Evans said that the scalping suffered by his birds was caused by animal welfare campaigners and claimed that his breeding pheasants only spent about four or five months a year in the cages. The pheasants in the cages were used for breeding, he said.
The battery cages at Bettws are just one part of a vast multi-million pound machine that churns out hundreds of thousands of game birds every year. The caged birds produce around half a million eggs per year, which are hatched to produce pullets for rearing in vast enclosed sheds. These colossal units - and there are at least three at Bettws - can house around eight thousand birds at a time.
But these creatures fare little better than those in the battery units. Each shed has covered outdoor runs which are shared by hundreds of birds. When they are around eight weeks old they are moved to release enclosures - large fenced-in units that can hold hundreds of birds.
"It's factory farming with a shooting gallery at the end of it," says Andrew Tyler, director of Animal Aid, an animal welfare group. "It's grotesque and unnecessary."
Once on the estate, the young birds are kept in grass runs and fed twice a day. When they are finally released, they are offered regular food by hand or from hoppers to encourage them to stay in the shooting zones. The last thing a shooting estate needs is its lucrative stock of game birds taking to the wing.
"The trouble is that the birds become reliant on humans because they have been treated like a domestic fowl," admitted one seasoned countryman. "They have no sense of danger from man and that makes the business of shooting them as wild birds a joke."
The vast hidden enterprise behind Bettws Hall aims to consistently provide huge numbers of birds for shooting on the company's estates around the UK. The company behind it - G&A Leisure Limited - runs shoots on three estates on the Welsh marches, one in Devon, and a vast 10,000 acre wilderness near Machynlleth, north Wales. One of the favourites is known as Viagra because of the spectacular number of top class partridge available and "the high angle of birds leaving the ground".
All these shoots require stocking with hundreds of thousands of birds, a mammoth logistical exercise - and a lucrative one too. Pheasant eggs retail for around 30 pence each but once they've hatched and the pullets are a few weeks old, they are worth three pounds. But the real money lies at the end of a gun.
"Each dead bird can net the organiser of the shoot around £35," says Andrew Tyler of Animal Aid. "A day's shooting for an average party can cost anything up to £12,000. But this money doesn't go to hard-pressed farmers or to boost the impoverished rural economy. Most of it ends up in the pockets of a few agri-businessmen."
Game shooting is now one of Britain's fastest growing participation sports. Enthusiasm has been fuelled by celebrities such as Madonna, Guy Ritchie, Vinnie Jones, Prince Harry and Marco Pierre White. In the City, banging away at pheasants has become almost a corporate perk.
A typical shooting party of eight can expect to kill around 350 birds a day. Thousands of birds are beaten into the path of the guns to ensure a satisfactory number of kills. And if a client is less than a perfect shot? Bettws Hall says it will gladly have a trainer on hand to guide him through the process of blasting away at the pheasants and partridges.
Game shooting is now a billion pound industry - with the UK pheasant population estimated at around 35 million. About half of these are shot every year. Campaigners against shooting claim that the majority of birds shot are not even eaten but are instead dumped in trenches and buried - citing articles in pro-shooting magazines. This is angrily denied by Gwyn Evans, co-owner of G&L Leisure.
He says: "All of the birds that are shot are eaten. Every last one of them. The meat is absolutely beautiful. I've never come across anyone who does not eat their birds."
Massive opposition is now building to the industrialisation of game shooting. Animal Aid is calling for the outlawing of factory farmed game birds.
"This has already happened in Holland," says Andrew Tyler. "This would ensure that only genuinely wild birds are shot. The argument against fox-hunting was powerful enough but this is 100 times more potent."
Few, of course, believe that Animal Aid would stop there. They see this ban as the first step in the abolition of all shooting and wildfowling. And it is this prospect that's beginning to worry traditional shooters. Publicly, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation says that legislation "is a matter for Government". Privately they are known to be extremely worried about the prospects for their sport. For this reason they roundly condemn the industrialisation of game farming, fearing that the whole sport is now vulnerable.
Last week the fears of the shooting lobby were crystalised with the publication of the draft Animal Welfare Bill. This seeks to update much of Britain's animal protection legislation but the Government also said it was looking hard at the intensification of the shooting industry. Ben Bradshaw, the minister responsible, said that it was "something that needed to be addressed."
Traditionalists are more vocal about their fears. Robin Page, a committed defender of country sports who helps organise a wild pheasant shoot in Cambridgeshire, says: "You would think people had learnt nothing from the hunting ban. The whole sport could end up being banned because of this dreadful and indefensible way of producing birds. In my view, hunting with dogs causes far fewer problems than competition fishing and big bag shooting."
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