so your better informed to comment on subjects that you know very little about il let you know about game shooting for the common man.
Ours is a working syndicate so 10 guns all pay the same amount of money (£1400 a year for 10 shoot days plus one tenants day) we rent a few hundred acres from a larger estate comprising of several thousand acres for about 3k a year. the greater majority of that land is mixed woodland surrounded by arable land with a small barn in the middle that is the base for the shoot. we have 4 release pens that we built and maintain annually that eventually feed 8 drives. we release 1600 poults into the 4 pens around july time then try to keep them alive till when mid october when we start shooting ( pheasants are like sheep in the sense that all they want to do is die) we buy growers pellets for the birds then as time goes on corn from the adjacent farm. we all share the workload so i’m usually up there a couple of times a week as a minimum all year round. non of us are gentry, infact ones a teacher, another a welder, i’m a tree contractor and my mates a butcher. one of the guys does admin type work and another is a boat day skipper. gardener, retired cnc machine operator, building site manager and school caretaker make up the rest. we all chip in for the food on a shoot day and my mate who’s the butcher and runs a small farm shop provides the grub. it’s a stand one/beat one type affair so there’s two teams of 5 and on each drive 5 are shooting and 5 are beating. we also have about 20 people who turn up to beat. no ones paid anything but all the additional beaters are fed and take a brace of birds at the end of the day. the beaters are mostly fiends and family who come for the day out and enjoy the day and the exercise plus they enjoy working their dogs if they have one. most of the beaters have been going for as long as i can remember. one of the guns of one of the 5 man teams couldn’t make it today so two of the beaters got to shot two drives each for the day, it’s pretty relaxed. we have a beaters day mid season. the shoots been going about 30 years and generally we will shoot around 40-60 birds on a shoot day. any birds that are left at the end of the day go to my mates shop. the shoot doesn’t usually have much money left at the end of the season, it just about covers all the costs. myself and another guy usually shoot 30 foxes a year off the ground, most of those are town foxes that come across looking for an easy feed. we also manage the deer on this section of the estate.
its a lot of work and no ones there for anything apart from the enjoyment of it, guns and beaters alike