SOME of Britain’s highest profile game-shooting enthusiasts are turning their back on the sport in disgust at the “mass slaughter” of birds, often by parties of City traders paying thousands of pounds a day.

Those who have largely given up traditional organised shoots that kill several hundred birds in a day include Marco Pierre White and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the chefs. Guy Ritchie, the film director and husband of Madonna, is also understood to have been put off large-scale shooting.

There is now such an over-supply of game birds that thousands of those killed are not eaten but simply buried at the end of a shoot.

“I used to shoot for about 85 days a year; I once shot 65 birds in one go. You don’t really think about it, but afterwards when I counted them up it really affected me,” said White. “I simply cannot justify in my own mind killing all those birds.

“I still shoot with friends perhaps five days a year for highflying birds and for smaller bags. I find it more challenging.” Shooting has boomed in recent years and has almost threatened to rival golf as the City’s favourite networking sport. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation saw its membership rise to 128,000 last year from 110,000 in 1996.

Tomorrow sees the traditional start of the grouse season, delayed from today, “the Glorious 12th”, to avoid shooting on a Sunday. It lasts until December and will see some 50,000 birds shot across Britain.

Grouse are all wild birds, but some of the sharpest criticism has surrounded pheasants and partridges reared for shooting.

“In recent seasons, pheasants and partridges have been raised and shot in such vast numbers that no market could be found to take them all,” says Fearnley-Whittingstall on his website.

“Birds have been buried in mass graves or simply ploughed into the fields. Such massacres of apparently disposable birds put any possibility of a convincing moral defence under the greatest possible strain.”

Commercial shoots charge up to £6,000 per person for a package that includes a day’s shooting plus a black tie supper and overnight accommodation in venues such as a country house hotel, manor or castle.

The Scottish Highlands are the most popular area for grouse shooting, while pheasants are shot in large numbers over much of England, particularly East Anglia and western counties such as Devon and Wiltshire.

One former shooter said, however, that many of the new breed of shooting enthusiasts were far more interested in killing the maximum number of birds than in the sport.

“There’s a sense that the commercial shooters are going for bigger and bigger bags, that hauls of over 1,000 birds for eight guns is a considerable slaughter. It’s gone back to Edwardian shooting and it’s all being driven by City money,” he said.

James Wheatley, an accountant, used to shoot for pleasure in Scotland before moving to Suffolk two years ago.

Now he has hung up his gun for the last time, disenchanted by the direction the sport has taken. “The whole aim of breeding some of these birds for commercial purposes is to get them to fly and be shot and I really find that offensive.”

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