Every August, a familiar, back-slapping, self-congratulatory ritual plays out in Britain’s food pages. The driven grouse shooting season begins, and within days a handful of chefs start telling journalists which grouse they will and won’t put on the menu.
This one is “responsibly sourced”, they claim. That one comes from an estate with “good practice.”
Really?
Every grouse on a restaurant plate has been produced by intensively managing an entire upland landscape in order to maximise a so-called ‘surplus’ available for guns to shoot. Heather is burned to force the young growth grouse prefer. Peatland is drained. And anything that might eat a grouse chick or its eggs — foxes, stoats, weasels — is trapped and killed in industrial quantities, while the illegal persecution of birds of prey on and around driven grouse moors is, as repeated documentation proves, endemic to the ‘sport’.
This is not ‘rotten apples’ or an anomaly or some sort of regrettable side effect. It is the business model.
When a chef draws a line between one moor and another, they are not opting out of that system. They are choosing a single supplier from within it and asking to be congratulated for the choice. It’s the sourcing equivalent of a chef turning down bluefin tuna from one boat while ordering it from the boat next door because its livery is prettier. The tuna is still endangered. The moor is still burned. The stoats are still dead in the traps. There are still far fewer Hen Harriers than there should be.
The entire point of a grouse moor is to concentrate as many birds as possible within the range of the guns, and suppress everything in the ecosystem that competes with them. Exactly which part of this merits a ‘responsibly sourced’ label?
This year the cherry-picking looks even more indefensible. Yet another ‘poor season’ and smaller-than-usual birds - which shoots themselves have acknowledged is the result of poor chick nutrition, parasite burdens like ticks and worms, and harsh moorland weather that limited the availability of young heather - appears now to be framed as though scarcity or poor health were a virtue rather than a warning of just how unsustainable the driven grouse shooting industry really is.
Richard Corrigan, a Mayfair chef who appears to be regularly approached for comment as he has spoken out against “large-scale ‘factory’ grouse shooting operations”, was quoted in a 12 August article in The Guardian by Helena Horton, for example, openly admitting that the birds would be “smaller and fewer” than usual but that “is fine and it is a treat”.
‘Hot Dinners’, apparently London's largest independent dining-out publication and website, falls into the same hole. Admitting that “it's been a challenging year” with “the heat in particular affecting habitats”, the site warns not to expect “too much on the actual day”, but still goes on to list restaurants that should be serving Red Grouse “soon”. One of those restaurants sources grouse from Bolton Abbey Estate, a huge estate in the Yorkshire Dales owned by the Duke of Devonshire. According to Who Owns England, the estate received a staggering £330,261 in farm subsidies in 2018. In March 2024 a Natural England assessment found the section of the West Nidderdale, Barden and Blubberhouses Moors SSSI covering Barden Moor — part of the Bolton Abbey Estate — in "unfavourable declining" condition.
Meanwhile, platforms like The Staff Canteen are still - after decades of the evidence of the harm grouse shooting causes - framing the ‘Inglorious Twelfth’ (ie the start of months of killing Red Grouse) as some kind of celebration of Britain’s “only truly wild game bird” and a “cornerstone of seasonal cooking”, writing that a day (notable only for the fact that it becomes legal to shoot one of Britain and Ireland’s only endemic birds) remains one of the “most talked-about dates in the British culinary calendar”.
It seems the food industry is apparently happy talking about grouse shooting, but not to take much of an effort to actually understand what their 'seasonal treat’ really costs…
If the catering industry appears to know enough to ask an estate about its “sustainability” credentials, it should also understand what driven grouse shooting requires to exist at all. Choosing to look no further than the answer it wants to hear is not diligence. It’s the same self-serving trick the clients perform when they book a day’s shooting on an estate and tell themselves that a carefully-written press release is evidence enough that all is well.
There is also something telling in which chefs get the media column inches. It’s rarely the ones who simply refuse to serve any grouse at all: it’s the ones who still keep the dish on the menu, still bank the money, while presenting a question about sourcing as proof of moral legwork.
Journalists are complicit in that framing too, treating a supplier’s postcode as a proxy for an ethical audit that nobody has actually carried out.
The result is a story that flatters everyone involved - chef, estate, diner - while changing nothing about how many raptors are found dead on grouse moors each spring, or how much peat is still burned to keep the heather at the right age for chicks.
The phrase “wilful blindness” - popularised by the Raptor Persecution UK blog to describe shooting’s paying customers looking away from what happens to Hen Harriers, Peregrines, Golden Eagles, and Short-eared owls on the moors they shoot over - comes to mind. It’s just our opinion, but frankly no one comes out of sharing a toilet with the grouse shooting industry without s**t sticking to them…
What we could applaud is chefs admitting that they have been cogs used by an industry that needs taking apart, and saying something meaningful along the lines of the Scottish Greens rural affairs spokesperson Ariane Burgess MSP, who is quoted saying, “The real glorious future for Scotland’s moors would be seeing wildlife flourish on them, peatlands restored and rural jobs created through the recovery of our natural environment.”
Instead, they are trying to win points for serving up a bird found nowhere else on Earth that has been run through a system of burned peat, poisoned raptors and trapped predators so that a small number of people can shoot it for ‘sport’.
In reality, there is only shooting’s supply chain, and everyone who buys into any part of it - and that includes the chefs cosplaying concern and wanting plaudits for their supposed discernment - is complicit in what it costs to put that bird on the plate.
Any chef can wash their greens. None of them can greenwash a grouse moor - and no seasoning on earth can make this industry palatable…
Over the coming months our campaign will look at the shooting industry at every level. We will highlight the suppliers — the farms, hatcheries, importers and breeders producing tens of millions of birds under conditions that would provoke public outcry if applied to any other animal. We will expose the providers — the estates and syndicates that take those factory-farmed birds and sell the experience of killing them as leisure. And we will look at the clients — the paying guns who are fully aware of the wildlife crime, the trapping of native predators, and the mass suffering involved, and who have decided that none of it is reason enough to stay away.
This industry survives because suppliers supply, providers provide, and clients pay. We intend to examine them all.
We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.
Many of you have already become a Game Changer, standing with us as we take this fight forward, week by week, piece by piece, until the public, the media and the politicians can no longer look away. We are extremely grateful
We are reaching a larger audience all the time, many of whom won’t know that Game Changers help us fund investigations, take on staff, and make us more effective. So we are going to repeat the call here - this is just the beginning, please be a part of it.
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