Mystery 'blanket man' caught on CCTV hanging dead pheasants outside shop

SWNS

This is the bizarre moment a man hiding under a blanket hangs four dead pheasants outside a gun shop.  The birds were left strung up by their necks on the front door of Jack Hallam and Sons in Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire.  CCTV appears to show an elderly man with a walking stick and draped in a blue blanket, approaching the closed shop on Sunday (15/12) afternoon.

Transcript

00:00If you could just tell us your name and where we are today.

00:04Yeah, Mr Robert Hallam, we're in Whaley Bridge.

00:06The shop's called Jack Hallam and Sons and Hallam's Country Sports.

00:09It's a traditional country sports outfitters dealing with all types of country pursuits.

00:15We sell shotguns, rifles, air rifles, various other types of things used for country pursuits, training accessories.

00:23But obviously we do sell shotguns that can be used on organised shoots to shoot pheasants and other birds.

00:30It was last Sunday, about ten past one, I was on my way into Manchester to watch the football for the day with Manchester City.

00:38And then I got a phone call from a friend asking if I'd hung some pheasants outside my shop.

00:43I said, not really, it's not the kind of thing we do.

00:46And he said, well, somebody has. So then I had to look at the CCTV footage and the footage on the camera was what you can see.

00:55It was a very strange character covered in a blue sort of blanket.

01:00And then they were obviously disguising themselves from the camera and hung the pheasants on the front of the shop,

01:05which was a very strange thing to be doing on a Sunday lunchtime.

01:08When I saw the CCTV footage, I mean, it was so bizarre seeing somebody stooped over with a sort of cane or a walking stick.

01:16And yeah, just to see somebody doing that in front of the shop was something I've never seen before.

01:22I wonder what kind of person had come up with an idea to do such a thing, really.

01:25It was a bit of a shock and amazement, I suppose.

01:28I'd like to think it was just somebody doing some kind of daft joke, not a particularly funny one in our view.

01:34It doesn't look good for the business.

01:37But yeah, I mean, they could have a hundred different reasons why they thought they were doing something,

01:41either to help or to be clever, I'm not sure.

01:44I'd much prefer it never happened again, not to my shop or to any other business.

01:48If they want to come forward, we're more than happy to deal with it internally.

01:52But it would be nice to find out who the person actually is.

01:55What's happened obviously portrays the shooting industry in a bit of a negative way and the way pheasants are treated.

02:00And we're always trying to champion eating the quarry that's been shot.

02:04Pheasant is a very, very good food to eat.

02:07And it's also organic.

02:09And it's just a superfood, basically, like a lot of game is and should be promoted a lot more.

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