Game handling: how to look after shot birds from peg to chiller

First, the point worth stating plainly: most shoots handle their game conscientiously, and standards across the country have improved beyond recognition in a generation. This is not an indictment of an industry. But it takes only a minority, sometimes a single careless shoot, to undo that good work.

The image our critics reach for is the old one: birds piled at the peg, slung into a pickup and forgotten while the Guns head for the pub, and above all the bird that never reaches the table. Such scenes are rare now, but the close season is exactly the moment for every shoot, however good, to take stock, because from 2029 the stakes change again. The idea for this piece came from Dylan Williams, who chaired the game handling panel at the Game Shooting Conference, held with the GWCT at Holland & Holland Shooting Ground in March. That panel stole the show, and its argument was simple and worth restating: the utilisation of shot game, graded, well handled and sold, is the single most important argument in favour of our sport. Knock it away and we lose the central defence of everything we do. We shoot food, and the moment a shoot cannot show that, it hands our critics their easiest line of attack.

Why the lead shot ban changes everything from 2029

The Government has now confirmed that the sale and use of lead shot for live quarry shooting will be banned from 1 April 2029, after a three-year transition. At a stroke that removes the single biggest barrier that has kept British game off supermarket shelves. Tristan Kirk of Lincolnshire Game, which already supplies Waitrose, M&S and Aldi, cannot wait: once the ban is in, he says, he will be able to present game to every retailer in the country. The idea that we shoot too much game is, to his mind, a myth. The problem was never volume but that too little of it is looked after well enough to reach a shelf, where shoppers buy with their eyes.

Stewart McIntyre of Loyton draws the obvious corollary. More game entering the food chain means more scrutiny, not less, and a non-toxic-shot bird turns green just as readily as a lead-shot one if it is mishandled. The window to put our house in order, he warns, is closing.

The first hour after a bird hits the ground

A bird’s future as food is decided in the minutes after it hits the ground. Alan Hayward of Oakland Park, the first new game-processing plant to open in Britain for 40 years, puts it plainly: the next hour is the most important hour of that bird’s role as food. Lay birds on their backs, spaced out, never heaped. “Treat it as if you want to eat it yourself,” he says. “If it looks nice and you’d want to eat it, that’s how every bird should go out.”

Tristan is more precise still. Heat damage, he says, begins within the first 20 minutes. Birds touching one another generate their own heat and taint the meat even on a cold day, and no buyer will touch anything showing a hint of green. From the peg, birds should move quickly to a game cart, segregated, wings open and breasts up, hung individually wherever possible, then into a chiller at 0-4°C as fast as can be managed. It is the regime set out in BASC’s Guide to Good Game Handling: rapid cooling, scrupulous cleanliness and storing small game at 4°C or below.

The economics explain why processors are so exacting. Alan grades out around half of everything he handles, a bird too small, a damaged breast, a broken leg or a touch of green, which makes the job barely profitable but keeps his name in the game. Tristan’s figures are starker. He runs 14 refrigerated vans covering all four corners of England; each costs some £50,000, lasts three years and holds about 1,000 pheasants. If 40% of a load arrives heat damaged, he has driven a fortune around the country to collect almost nothing. Picking up a single bird, he notes, costs at least 50p before anyone has even begun to process it.

Why processing game costs more than poultry

Game is also far costlier to handle than farmed poultry. A chicken is bred for meat and plucked by machine; a chilled game bird, held below 4°C, has its feathers all but welded in, so they must be drawn by a skilled hand and then waxed, a chicken plant’s worth of process at a fraction of the speed, with a Food Standards Agency vet on site every day.

The market that does exist is largely abroad. Two-thirds of Alan’s pheasants are exported, mainly to Belgium, where the whole bird is actually eaten; the English appetite for it remains thin, and every extra stage of handling, breasting or metal-detecting, erodes the margin further. The old escape routes are closing too: pet food now demands near human-grade standards, so a poorly handled bird can no longer be written off as dog meat.

What good infrastructure looks like on a shoot

Loyton shows what is possible with infrastructure and intent. Across its five sporting shoots on Exmoor, its chillers are inspected by North Devon Council, birds are hung for around 24 hours, then crated, cocks and hens kept separate, and graded again before Oakland Park collects. Because the quality is reliable, Stewart’s shoots were paid for their game in a season when many dealers stopped collecting altogether, or charged shoots to take the birds away.

The game cart is where a bird’s fate is sealed

One Loyton investment deserves singling out: the company trains the person on the game cart. The cart, not the peg, is where a bird’s fate as food is sealed, and it is arguably the most important step in the whole process. The handler grades each bird and sets aside any that are damaged before one spoiled carcass taints a tray. Big shoot or small, every shoot should train its game cart handler properly.

“How can we justify going out and shooting pheasants, then paying to get rid of them as if they were a waste byproduct?” Stewart asks. He is equally candid about the regulatory vacuum. Much of what shoots ought to be doing is already a legal requirement few realise exists: anyone supplying game to an approved handling establishment must have a trained person to inspect the birds and complete a declaration, yet there is little enforcement and no real penalty for getting it wrong. Cost, he concedes, is a barrier for smaller shoots, but a chiller “doesn’t have to cost a fortune”. His sharpest point is traceability: walk into a beef or dairy farm, ask to see every record and inspection, and you are handed the folder. Few shoots could survive the same scrutiny, and closing that gap, he argues, is the task now in front of the industry.

Assurance schemes and the traceability gap

John Duncan of Roxtons, which books days across some 60 shoots, has watched assurance schemes come and go, from the British Game Alliance and Aim to Sustain to today’s Trusted Game, under which a Yorkshire shoot he is involved with recently earned a gold award after a full vet inspection. Not every shoot can run a Loyton-grade operation, though, and John is a realist about it. In the north he opened his own chiller so that smaller shoots could hang their game and have it collected in one place, a model he believes more areas should adopt.

His abiding frustration is that not every shoot signed up to self-regulation when it had the chance; had the whole community done so, he believes we would be far better placed to defend ourselves now. The alternative, all four voices agree, is regulation imposed by people who understand nothing of sustainable shooting or rural land management.

There is reason for optimism, if the industry raises its game. With beef and other meats having roughly doubled in price, well-handled game at a steady price suddenly looks attractive. New routes are opening, too. Eat Wild, the only body marketing British game in this country and funded entirely by Guns through a voluntary 50p per bird, is no longer shifting the odd brace but moving game by the tonne, with one catering partner placing 54 tonnes of venison on its menus this year. Its work has put venison and pheasant into stadiums and hospitality from Wimbledon and Twickenham to the Oval, Edgbaston and Wembley, onto the shelves of every major supermarket, and into NHS and nursery kitchens. That is precisely the market Tristan and the others need, and it costs a shoot almost nothing to build: the levy is little more than £6 a Gun on a 100-bird day. Any shoot not yet signed up should add the 50p to its invoices and back the campaign at eatwild.co. The Country Food Trust, meanwhile, turns shot game into meals for food banks. Guns are wising up too: John is increasingly asked “where’s the game going? Does it have a route to market?” before a day is booked.

A close-season checklist for your larder

Which brings us back to the close season, the moment to walk into your larder, confirm the chiller holds at 0-4°C, send a competent person on the trained-person qualification, agree grading standards and collection dates with your dealer, and brief every picker-up and beater. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between producing food and producing waste. A sensible first step is BASC’s Guide to Good Game Handling, which sets out the practical steps and food hygiene rules that apply to your shoot.