Welland Valley Game (Leics)

“The family farm maintains its arable and sheep enterprises, however, an interest in sportings and country pursuits meant that working with game birds seemed a natural progression…21 years after starting the business, Welland Valley Game is a much larger operation, supplying many tens of thousands of birds to shoots throughout the UK.” The pages of Welland’s website paint a far rosier picture of life for the birds that farms like this rear for the gun than investigations into the shooting industry have proven repeatedly. The carefully-written prose almost sidesteps the reality of intensively breeding birds to be shot, but the Farm runs its own Blaston Shoot which promises “175-200 bird days to parties of between 8-10 guns” (so around 35 – 40 birds for each shooter) and points more towards the huge numbers this industry sells every year. The portly ‘character’ in the hat Welland uses to promote its shoot might be having ‘a laugh’, but it’s an entirely different story for the thousands of birds involved…