Understanding the shooting community

If you’ve been around these pages for any length of time, you’ve likely come across a reference somewhere to the Game Shooting Census. It is our annual survey that we have carried out since 2013 and it provides a yearly snapshot of the shooting community’s habits, opinions and preferences.

Putting the Census together each year takes a fair amount of work, but pulling it all together is well worth it. Not only does it give me an endless supply of stats and jumping off-points to create interesting content (lots of our most-read articles each year are based on Census data), but it generates some absolutely vital information on the shooting community as a whole.

Protecting shooting's future

Data from the Census has been used by those fighting our corner in the corridors of power [do corridors have corners? Ed.] to help protect and promote shooting. The major shooting organisations - BASC, Countryside Alliance and GWCT - also make use of the results to help inform their decision-making.

For the last few years, the Census has been sponsored by insurance broker and financial services provider Lycetts. I spoke to Edmund from Lycetts to understand why they feel that the Census is a cause they want to get behind.

“As an insurance broker who is heavily involved in the rural community,” he told me. “It is vital that we keep abreast of the key issues that are affecting the shooting world, to help us protect shooting businesses and the vital incomes that they generate for rural communities.” 

Shooting's conservation credentials

One of the strongest arguments in favour of shooting is the conservation work - either incidental or deliberate - carried out by shooting estates. Through the Shoot Owner Census we learn that the average shoot occupies 1,888 acres, plants 40 acres of cover crops each season, manages 340 acres of woodland and planted an additional 5 acres in the last 12 months.

Exact figures for the number of shoots in the UK are hard to come by, but here at GunsOnPegs our best estimate is 12,000. Multiply those figures up and we arrive at some huge numbers: twenty-two million acres under management, 480,000 acres of cover crops planted, 4 million acres of woodland under management and 60,000 acres of new woodland planted in the last year.

These are figures that should carry a lot of weight, and even more so when you consider that 95% of shoots carry out predator control, two thirds create wildlife areas, a similar proportion control invasive plants and one third even install bird boxes or bee houses. How many other sectors can say that they do anything like as much?

The other strong argument in favour of shooting is the financial impact. The average gun plans to spend £6,877 on shooting this season, a figure which does not include additional spend on cartridges, travel, food and accommodation.

The fact that more than half of guns plan to shoot outside of their home region this year demonstrates how not only does shooting generate a lot of expenditure, but it redistributes wealth around the country, and, crucially, to rural areas. Two of the most popular regions in which to shoot are East Anglia and the South West, two of the least urban areas in the UK. Previous years’ surveys have revealed for the first time how much shooting is worth to the hospitality industry.

This kind of qualitative information has been used by our shooting organisations to shape policy and make the case for shooting in the corridors of power on many occasions.

Standards and assurance

The game meat market has been a talking point for several seasons now, and with anti-shooting voices keen to jump upon any bad practice, the importance of assurance schemes like British Game Assurance has been cited in Parliament. However, for the last few years the Shoot Owner Census has revealed a disconnect between how much it is valued by guns and how much shoot operators think it matters to their guns. 

The news that more than 40% of guns say that knowing a shoot is BGA registered would make them more likely to purchase a day there, or that 63% of guns say that a shoot’s ability to demonstrate a net positive environmental impact would make them more likely to buy a day there, can be used to guide shoots towards best practice, further protecting shooting from accusations.

A decade of data

Next year’s Census will be the tenth. Over that time there are countless similar examples of how the data gathered has helped shoot operators to understand what guns are looking for from a day’s shooting, whether that’s about what they want to be served at lunch, or around shoot standards and best practice.

Perhaps the biggest impact of the Census over time has been to give decision-makers in the world of shooting - from shoot operators to the shooting organisations - accurate information to inform their choices, practices, policies or campaigns. 

Edmund said: “Lycetts are proud that by supporting the Game Shooting and Shoot Owner Census, we’re able to help guns, shoot operators and the world of shooting to better understand its strengths, and to take advantage of the opportunities to make it stronger.”