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HSUS Seeks Criminal Charges Against Live Pigeon Shoot

November 6, 2006

Backed by videotaped evidence shot from a helicopter, a cruelty investigator for the Humane Society of the United States is seeking criminal charges alleging that a live pigeon shoot in Oxford, N.C., violates the state's animal cruelty laws.

The Dogwood Gun Club's "Sixteenth Annual Fall Invitational" pigeon shoot is one of the most notorious in the world, drawing shooters who pay $275 per day to massacre more than 50,000 pigeons in the course of five days. North Carolina is one of only two states (the other is Pennsylvania) known to have live pigeon shoots.

A Merciless Ritual

The pigeons are kept jammed into crowded pens with no food or water. Disoriented, frightened, weak and dehydrated by the time of the event, the birds are stuffed into a small box called a "trap," one bird per box. Twenty yards away stands a customer with a shotgun. When he yells, "Pull!", someone yanks a cord that opens the spring-loaded trap, tossing the bird about 3 feet into the air.

Sometimes the pigeon flies, sometimes she flutters back to the ground and begins walking aimlessly around. Either way, she is doomed. The shooter blasts her to smithereens.

Suffering and Slow Death

At the Labor Day pigeon shoot in Hegins, Pa., which was shut down by The Fund for Animals in 1999, 70 percent of the birds were wounded rather than killed outright. If the same percentage holds at Dogwood—which is conducted in a format similar to Hegins—35,000 pigeons will have died slow, painful, and terrifying deaths at the Fall Invitational.

Wounded birds who fall on or near the killing field are periodically collected by staff who stomp them to death, wring their necks or pull off their heads. The bodies are dumped into a trench and covered over with a front-end loader. Those who are able to fly farther away die slowly of starvation, dehydration, infection, blood loss or lead poisoning from the lead shot typically used.

A neighbor of the Dogwood Gun Club told HSUS staff that whenever there is a shoot, she finds dead and dying pigeons on her roof and in her yard.

Criminal and Cruel

By any civilized definition, this is animal cruelty of the most repugnant sort. And despite claims to the contrary, it is not—by any reasonable definition—hunting. According to Robert Reder, North Carolina state manager and cruelty investigator for The HSUS, "This event may have the words dog and gun in its title, but don't be fooled into thinking it has anything to do with hunting."

Reder concluded, "The HSUS is seeking criminal charges because the evidence of cruelty we obtained is overwhelming."