Our hidden cameras caught bird flu rules being ignored on his Ashcombe Estate. Trading Standards has now set out the law to him.
Film director Guy Ritchie has been forced to follow bird flu rules at his Ashcombe Estate after a Green Britain Foundation investigation.
The multi-millionaire director's 1,100-acre Wiltshire estate runs as a commercial shoot where guests pay up to £15,000 a day to kill pheasants and partridges for fun.
Wiltshire Council Trading Standards stepped in and sent Ritchie written advice setting out the law.
Officials acted after our undercover investigation exposed what was going on. Our cameras caught pheasant and partridge feed being dumped on open tracks. Wild birds were filmed eating from uncovered feeders. A dead bird's claw was left by a release pen for days. All of it during a bird flu outbreak.
"When rules are ignored over many days on Guy Ritchie's estate, it tells you something is badly wrong. He needs to own this. His land, his shoot, his responsibility. We're always told it's just a few bad apples on the ground. That's a convenient excuse. Responsibility sits squarely with the people who own the land and profit from how it's run."
We sent our footage, logs and camera locations to the Animal and Plant Health Agency in January. It passed the case to Wiltshire Trading Standards, which took it up with Ritchie. The council told us our evidence was "helpful in supporting compliance".
There is a glaring absurdity in the law that is exploited by those who shoot birds for fun. Once so-called game birds such as pheasants and partridges are released for shooting they miraculously change in the eyes of the law from captive birds to wild birds. That means bird flu rules for kept birds do not apply to them in the same way.
Millions of birds are bred and released every year so people can pay to shoot them. Yet the moment they leave the pen the law pretends they are wild. We campaign against shooting birds for sport. No amount of tinkering with the rules changes what this industry is.
We will keep watching shooting estates. And we will keep reporting what we find.
A year after our hidden cameras filmed snares being set at a stink pit on the edge of North Wales' only grouse moor, North Wales Police have charged two men. It is believed to be the first case under the Welsh snares ban on land used for game shooting.
Read MoreScotland's environment watchdog has finally handed a file on dead salmon buried on North Uist to prosecutors. It took more than two years after we exposed it.
Read MoreWild trout are ballooning on waste from a salmon farm the Soil Association calls organic. It's time to stop calling factory farming organic.
Read MoreScottish Government scientists found farmed salmon DNA in wild fish across a fifth of Scotland's rivers, and worst where the farms are. Four public bodies paid for the study. None of them announced it.
Read More
