Aikengall & Monynut shoot (E Lothian)

Just south of Dunbar, “Aikengall & Monynut prides itself in offering a wide variety of partridge and pheasant shooting across two estates at the foothills of the Lammermuirs. The birds are driven across high, steep gullies overlooking the spectacular East Lothian/Scottish Borders countryside.” They certainly are – and in ridiculous numbers. If anyone ever doubted quite why the estimates for the number of pheasants and partridges reared and released by the shooting industry could be so improbably high (around 40 million and 10 million respectively are the usual numbers given), just take a look at the gleeful and gratuitous online videos about this site of slaughter in Scotland, see the vast numbers of birds being flushed and then falling like rain, and wonder no more. An Instagram account associated with this shoot is an education about the realities of governments allowing the shooting industry such a free hand. Businesses like this tend to shoot huge numbers of birds three or four times a week (one shooting channel at Aikengall & Monynut quotes “we go up to five and six hundred bird days…”). What exactly do the people who line up to kill these fish in a Scottish barrel actually think about as birds are blasted out of the sky all around them – not about the birds themselves, that’s pretty much for certain, just “enjoying their day’s sport” according to one reviewer of the shoot…