Pheasant Preserves: Flushing Fair Chase Out

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	A female pheasant wants nothing more than to blend into the background.

In addition to stocked pheasant hunts, many shooters wishing to kill pheasants visit "boot and shoot" pheasant preserves and experience a guaranteed kill. One of the most popular birds offered at the thousands of bird preserves across the country, pheasant are often pen-reared onsite and placed into the field immediately before the shooters arrive, creating a canned hunt situation in which the animals have no chance of survival.

At these facilities, shooters pay a set price for each bird or purchase a hunt package in which a certain number of birds are guaranteed. During European or field hunts, guides place the birds in the field, sometimes disorienting the tame birds further by shaking them and positioning them upside down in the brush, before walking with shooters through the fields to flush the birds.

Some pheasant canned hunts boast 10,000 to 25,000 birds released every year and promote a flush guarantee—that is, the promise that hunters will get a shot at a certain percentage of the birds released.

The popular television comedy The Daily Show With Jon Stewart highlighted the unethical nature of canned pheasant hunts in a program that aired on March 15, 2006. A show correspondent traveled to Tobacco Stick Hunting Preserve in North Carolina to pick pheasant from a price menu. The program shows the guides unloading the birds from crates and placing them upside down in the brush. The guide then kicks a bird to get him to move for the correspondent's shot. Although this was a good forum to display the absurdity of pheasant preserves, the real "hunt" is no laughing matter.

Related Links

Pheasant Stocking

Rearing Pheasants

Releasing Pheasants

States with Pheasant Stocking Programs

The "Collateral Damages" of Pheasant Stocking

Tower Shoots

Flying in the Face of Ethics

Pheasant Stocking Report 2007