The North West League Against Cruel Sports is opposed to pheasant and grouse shooting for fun and the attendant slaughter of wild animals and birds by gamekeepers.
 

Pheasant Shooting

The image participants seek to evoke is one of gentlemanly conduct, self-discipline and respect for the 'quarry.' But pheasant rearing and shooting is now a massive business built on greed and excess, where the shed-reared birds are regarded as nothing more than feathered targets in a fairground-style shooting gallery.

Millions more birds are shot than are eaten. They continue to be mass produced to satisfy the base instincts of vain and boastful gunmen who associate manliness with the number of semi-domesticated birds they can blast out of the sky. [More details]
  

The season runs from 12 August to 10 December during which some half-million grouse are shot. Many birds fall wounded to suffer further from being picked up by dogs, whilst others fly on peppered with lead shot. The birds are not hand-reared like pheasants; instead their numbers are boosted by the gamekeepers' rigorous destruction of natural predators (some even resorting to killing of protected raptors) and the artifical maintaince of grouse moors kept exculsively for shooting. Young heather is a primary food source for grouse and in order to ensure plenty of tender shoots, the heather is burned in patches or strips which produces heather of different ages.

Some leading conservation bodies accept shooting on the grounds that the artifical management of grouse moors assists other wild species such as goden plover, dunlin and merlin. They fear that an end of grouse shooting might lead to increased afforestation with conifers. The League contends that over-afforestation could be controlled by legislation and that whilst grouse moors assist some species, afforestation is of benefit to others such as the red squirrel, woodcock, capercaille and buzzard.
 

There are five thousand gamekeepers in Britain whose task is to preserve game birds long enough for their employers to shoot them out of the sky for recreation. More than poachers, collectors or vandals, gamekeepers have been responsible for the demise of many species of predatory birds and animals which have been regarded as a threat to game birds. All raptors (hawks, falcons and owls, for example) are now protected by law, but legislation has come too late to save many species from the traps, poisons and guns of the gamekeepers, some of whom continue to kill raptors with illegal traps and poison. Despite legal protection, the survival of hen-harriers is threatened by some gamekeepers who shoot, trap, and destroy the nests and chicks of this rare species. Gamekeepers also trap and snare a wide variety of British species such as foxes, stoats, weasels and squirrels. Inevitably, protected species such as badgers, otters and wildcats still fall accidental victims to legal and illegal snares as do domestic pets such as cats and dogs.

Visit the National Anti-Snaring Campaign at www.antisnaring.org.uk