8th November 2008

Sabs from Gloucestershire were out on Saturday to attempt to stop a shoot at Brimpsfield Park in the beautiful Cotswold countryside. The first shoot of the day saw four sabs stop 5 of around 15 of the shooters who then broke guns and counted their losses. This meant that any birds flying to the left in the valley were able to get away this time.

Unfortunately the police were called just as the second shoot started and an Inspector and Sergeant of Gloucestershires cops made threats of arrest using the aggravated trespass card and sections of the Criminal Justice Act to ban us from the area. They didn’t take any details from us which so we have decided we will be back very soon.

It is a truly barbaric sport that will have you see maybe hundreds of deaths in a short space of time, gundogs will chase terrified birds who have been winged by inexperienced idiots and most of the idiot pickers up do not know how to dispatch these poor creatures and make a real bollocks up of breaking the creatures neck.

For all of us this was our first sab of a commercial shoot and we realised that with even a few of us we saved many lives and our actions have the potential to cost these businesses thousands of pounds each time we go into the field.

15th Novemeber 2008

The Cotswold countryside is a hive of shooting activity with sometimes dozens of shoots taking place in a radius of a couple of miles. We headed to Syde park this weekend to check an area of woodland that had been pegged out for shooters. Sure enough we heard gunshots although not in the area we expected. We spotted a beater five fields across using our binoculars and ran down into the valley ahead of the driven area. Sure enough a line of shooters stood in a small managed clearing at the bottom of the valley.

We shouted break guns and most of them did bar two shooters who almost shot a flag that one of us was using to make ourselves visible. As no private property signs were displayed and no red “danger” flag was visible we assumed it was safe to merrily walk in front of these guys... apparently not.

They game keeper (Terry) was not too amused, he apologised to the shooters (It’s not your fault Terry).

We were then escorted off Terry’s land by a couple of the beaters who were quite polite but a little pushy. When we were reluctant to leave what we thought was a public area Terry became quite angry and shouted and swore at us telling us to “GET OFF MY LAND” (Seriously we have this recorded).
With this the shoot called lunch early and the morning shoot was called off!
The Syde Park shoot was a small one but we have some great info on a large commercial shoot happening very soon nearby so we are looking forward to helping out the animals again!