Get Them Young: Children at Shoots

As the shooting season approached a supporter of our campaign wrote to the local paper:

It is really shocking that in this day and age people will line up and shoot live animals, but what of their children, we see them play truant from school to get out in the field as human shields for their parents, thus claiming that we animal welfare campaigners are filming their children, calling us paedophiles, when in fact we are filming to highlight to the public the needless slaughter of intensely reared birds shot in the name of sport.

These children are party to the slaughter of wildlife, but do their parents wonder at what "future parents" they are creating, slaughtering wildlife with parental cheer and encouragement is one thing, but if one section of society lauds shooting of birds for sport, it should come as no surprise when another group adopts the same belief in violence and abusive behaviour patterns towards people and animals. You give a child a gun to kill wildlife you give that child a licence to kill anything, whether it be wildlife, domestic pets or even us?

To back up up their claim the author of the letter said she had seen children attend shoots on the Hoghton Tower estate. When the reporter contacted Hoghton Tower this was flatly rejected.

Their denial is perhaps understandable, but misleading. Several children attended one particular shoot monitors attended. One shooter, who brought two children to see the massacre of wildlife, even asked the police to stop us filming children by which he meant stop filming him.