Throwing my 2P's worth into the hat. - Short story - there is no market for the birds we kill for fun, shooting is pretty much just an avenue for spending money, it doesn't make the shooting community look good.
I live in the UK in a big shooting area. Lots of people are involved with shooting sports here, not only that but lots of people shoot and own guns that are not that into shooting. Plenty of farmers and agricultural workers have guns, but may never actually go on a big shoot, so first thing to understand is that while there is a lot of big estate shoots ( i live on the boundary of three employing more than 6 full time game keepers) but there is also a lot of shooting that isn't driven game shooting at all.
Most pest control on farms is carried out by private individuals who do it as much for sport as for practical concerns.
Anyhow, when you look at whats gone on about a year ago the BGA was formed, the British game alliance. The alliance was seeking new markets for shot game, the problem is in the UK there is very little home market.
85% of consumers have never bought or cooked game of any sort at home.
When you look at the hayday of shooting the sale of game from the first days shooting would generally cover the Labour costs of producing the game and shooting it. In the old days birds were reared from eggs from wild stocks. Now days everything is bought in most the eggs that are hatched are not produced in this country. Its saves Labour and that's expensive.
Lets look at the average "estate" shoot.
This small estate employs one full time game keeper to which the estate usually provided a house, work clothing, and dog food as part of the job. Your average pay for our average keeper is about 21,000 per year,( about $27,000 ) your probably producing single handed the same shooting that it once took three or four men to produce each year. The value of the property is probably worth at least half that income to the estate if rented to anyone else per year.
Each bird produced and released is about 12.40 per bird.
the return is about 38%. 62% of the birds you release will not be seen again in hand.
Lets say the estate shoots 3 days a week, two small days and a larger day, for arguments sakes two 150 bird days and a 300 bird day. over the 16 weeks of the season thats 48 days shooting.
600 birds harvested a week, for 16 weeks, 9,600 birds shot, but thats only 38% of what you produced, so we need to raise about 25,000 pheasants.
25,000 birds will cost about 310,250 to rear and release.
the average price per bird is about 34.61 a cost that has doubled in the last 10 years so your 9600 shot birds are worth about 332,160 in income from the sold days.
your just about covering your game keepers salary at this point.
Fortunately you end up with 9600 birds to sell, which are worth about 0.30p each, this has halved in the last 10 years, bringing in an extra 3k or there about, looking at it like this working from average figures the costs just don't add up.
this is before you get to having to pay beaters, often 40 - 50 a day in my experience ( but the average figures say 25- 35 )
and pickers up with the reported average at 30 - 50)
The fact is that many estate shoots are running so that their owners can enjoy one or two family days at minimal expense, and invite guests who each return the favor with another day at their expense.
Its a game you can only afford to play when you have lots of money doing nothing, if the estate was concerned about making money or running as a business, they would double their profit by renting out the game keepers cottage.
Economically the industry just doesn't really work. You pass on all the costs of the birds to the guns that shoot them and get to sell the shot game; brilliant, but in the past there was a market for game, and now there is none.
Its difficult to sell an end product that contains lead, its isn't so much that people are concerned about eating lead, its that they are unfamiliar with eating game, cooking game, its not atypical in the populations diet, yet each year we harvest tons of it that we just cant sell, Meat here is quite cheap i think, as farming is heavily subsidized we dont pay the true cost of food, for instance it costs about 18 to produce a chicken to sell, yet we buy them oven ready for 3.80 go figure.
A great market for pheasant meat would be dog food, its a sad waste but not nearly as sad as estates running incinerators.
Nobody will buy dog food that will contain ground up lead particles. Americans wouldn't buy pheasant bratwurst minced with lead in it. Lead is pretty tough to extract from the meat. No not many people die from lead poisoning but it doesn't mean its good for you, it stands to reason anyway as clearly not that many people are regularly consuming the quantity's of game they would have to eat to consume all that is shot!
Steel has to be the answer as it is in theory easy to extract, mash the meet, float it on water over powerful magnets.
on your 150 bird day, there might be 8 guns, 19 birds a piece or there abouts, lets say they are high birds, 5 - 1 ratio, 95 shots per gun for the day, you cartridge cost for high performance game load steel is 267.000 per thousand cartridges. 0.27p per shot.
If your shooting high birds your probably not doing it with an old hammer gun; if you are you might need bismuth. 1142.00 / thousand. 1.15/shot or and extra 110 to shoot for the day. I think if your that dedicated and broke you will either just suck it up and shoot a new gun, or if your that dedicated you will just pay the extra 110.
Source available for average figures, full report below.
https://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/uk/rural---other/shoot-benchmarking-survey-2017-2018-season.pdf
