But what if the bird is regarded as a cash crop and thus a source of income for you as a farmer?
You can either keep it in pens, which stifle its natural instincts, and then cart it off in plastic crates to a slaughterhouse where someone will hang it up by its back legs and electrocute it (which is what happens to nearly all the poultry sold) or you can rear it to a certain point and then let it take its chance in the wild, to have around a 40 per cent chance of being shot on the wing the following winter.
If I was a bird, I thing I know which one I'd choose!
And, as for jobs, as someone who shoots, I have no problem in accepting the figures from the survey which, although commissioned by the CLA and BASC, was not carried out by them.
What is odd is that the BBC considers it newsworthy, as the information has been on the BASC website for about three years