We are regularly asked why more of what we film doesn’t end in a courtroom. It’s a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer.
Our footage is almost never enough on its own to prove a crime. At the same time, we are still building the End Bird Shooting movement - right now, changing minds matters as much as pursuing court cases we’re unlikely to win.
The Animal Welfare Act
First off, let’s look at the law. Section 4 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006, for example, is a broad law. It doesn’t require anyone to have meant harm. It covers negligence - an omission, a failure to notice, a failure to act - provided the person responsible ought reasonably to have known that suffering was likely.
As courts have confirmed, this is an objective test: it doesn’t need to be shown that a worker intended to cause suffering, only that a reasonably competent, reasonably humane person in their position ought to have known their conduct, or their failure to act, would cause it.
Take the footage from our last post on ‘Sorting’, reproduced again here: a chick caught and struggling on a hatchery sorting line, while the worker standing over it simply doesn’t notice - attention fixed elsewhere, on the next bird, the next tray, the next task the belt demands. That is negligent inattention, in the plainest sense of the phrase, and it is the kind of conduct Section 4 was written to capture. The same is true of chicks recorded being scooped up and dropped from a height onto the moving belt: we would maintain that is the same casual disregard for a fragile and vulnerable bird’s welfare.
Here is the problem, though. The investigator’s camera moves on. The investigator can’t stand in one place for long - they are supposed to be “working” and can’t risk drawing attention to themselves.
And while they can have a good idea what the camera is recording, there is no viewfinder to look through. Neither they nor we know how long that chick struggled for. There is constant movement and interaction. We don’t know whether the chick in the video managed to struggle free, was crushed, or was spotted and removed by someone further down the line. Whether any chicks were harmed or had bones broken by rough handling. The clips end, and with them the evidence.
A prosecution needs facts that satisfy a court, and a few seconds of an animal in distress with no resolution on camera rarely meets that standard.
The suffering may be real. The negligence may be real. Proving either to the standard a court wants is another matter entirely.
This is not a flaw in our evidence-gathering. It’s the reality of undercover work and how high the bar is set in bringing a prosecution.
What the footage does show
What footage like this does show, though, is something a criminal charge was never going to capture in the first place: the physical set-up and pace of an industry-standard sorting system, which sits uneasily beside the very code of practice the industry says it follows - a code that requires chicks to be handled with care, and that manual handling be kept to an absolute minimum.
Our footage covered a short window, but it is a truthful report of the gap between a published standard of ‘welfare’ and the routine way fragile, day-old birds passing along a conveyor belt are sorted and treated: as “units,” as product rather than individuals.
Why we still film, and still publish
We understand the frustration. Supporters want to see farms shut down, staff charged, something that looks like justice. So do we, and we won’t stop asking whether a prosecution is possible every time we review new footage.
But we’d rather be honest about the limits of what a short clip, however disturbing, can prove in a courtroom than pretend (to supporters and to ourselves) that every clip is proof enough on its own.
The value of what we’re building isn’t any single clip - it’s the volume and consistency of what we’re documenting across farm after farm, month after month, until the pattern itself becomes impossible for regulators, the media and the public to keep ignoring.
Why this still adds up to something
It’s worth remembering that a small, disparate campaign group with no litigation department can still change the prevailing culture and change the law. Fox hunting is proof of that. It started as a minority fight, was dismissed for decades as unwinnable, but a sustained campaign of exposure, argument and public pressure turned it into the Hunting Act 2004.
Taking on fox hunting wasn’t about trying to turn each chase as a criminal case. It was about challenging the concept of ‘tradition’, showing the reality of ripping animals apart, making the moral and ethical case over time. It was about making fox hunting itself indefensible.
We saw the same pattern play out this month with the Guga Hunt and the campaign brilliantly waged by our Protect the Wild colleagues. It was a shorter campaign than fox hunting of course, built around social media and very different levels of public sympathy for animals than the first hunt saboteurs had to deal with, but the strategy was much the same. Point out the absurdity of calling the killing of young seabirds an important tradition, detail the harm caused to wildlife, and challenge why something so destructive should be sanctioned by a public body whose reason for existing is working “to improve our natural environment in Scotland and inspire everyone to care more about it”.
The Guga Hunt campaign started from a similarly small base and a similar lack of awareness that the End Bird Shooting campaign faces. It didn’t move because of one court case. It moved because enough people were presented with the evidence and ultimately refused to look away.
That’s what this footage is for. Not a single prosecution, but a body of evidence that makes crystal clear what “standard practice” in bird shooting actually looks like, day after day, farm after farm, estate after estate - so that the gap between the industry’s own lobbying and welfare/conservation claims and its cages, conveyor belts, traps, and suffering becomes impossible to explain away.
So here’s what we’re asking. Not to sign something or turn up somewhere - there’s no petition open, no protest planned. Just this: learn what’s actually happening. Read our articles. Understand what a ‘game farm’ looks like; what ‘gamekeeping’ is all about; what a shoot day actually involves; what really happens to the animals and the land impacted by this horrible industry.
Then talk to the people in your lives who don’t know. Share what you learn. Be proud to say ‘Enough is enough’ and be proud that you can reject industry propaganda because you know it is wrong and why.
Movements are built step by step, push after push. They create change only when enough people have enough information that they can no longer accept industry explanations that simply don’t hold up.
Video and images recorded by our undercover investigator in 2025.
We are working to END BIRD SHOOTING. This suffering has to stop. Please share this article. Share our socials. Follow us for updates.
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.
Months of investigation like the work detailed above. Hundreds of hours of footage obtained and more being gathered. Farms across the UK exposed.
We are at the beginning of something that we think will change everything.
But we can’t do it on our own. We are asking you to become a Game Changer. To help us fund investigations, take on more staff, to stand 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.
This is the beginning. Please be a part of it.
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