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The ultimate free range food...
Game meat is highly sustainable and ethical, living in the wild as nature intended, with a natural diet … meaning you can have one too. It is effectively organic, although, except for venison, it cannot be referred to as such. This is because birds roam so freely that no one can 100% guarantee exactly where they have been or what they might have eaten; perhaps they snacked on some seeds in a field forming part of a farm which isn’t Organically Certified with the Soil Association.
That ability to roam free means that bird has had the best possible life, as nature intended, and infinitely superior to that of a “barn reared” chicken for example.
Conservation
Around £250million per year is spend on conservation work across the UK by those managing the landscape (nearly two million hectares (5 million acres of it) for shooting, generating the equivalent of 16,000 full time jobs.
Heather moorland is rarer than rainforest, and a whopping 75% of it is found in Great Britain.
This is thanks to the management of the moors for grouse shooting. That management helps to preserve and protect the peat, which is Britain’s biggest carbon store.
Research by the Game and Wildlife Conservation trust demonstrates that woodland managed for shooting, as opposed to commercial timber production, actually provides richer and more varied habitats.
In financial terms, shooting is worth over £2.5 BILLION per year to the British economy, supporting the equivalent of 74,000 jobs, and bringing cash into those rural areas with limited alternative employment opportunities outside the tourist season. The BASC report also found that established shoots generate economic benefits far further afield than simply direct employment. Hotels, B&B’s, pubs, shops and garages also benefit hugely.
So, in eating ethical British game you can be assured it has low carbon miles & negligible carbon footprint. Not only are you looking after yourself (pheasant meat is lower in fat & cholesterol, and higher in protein than chicken), but also the environment, and the Great British economy.
(all figures courtesy of the BASC "The Value of Shooting" Report)