Four pet ducks were killed by teenage thugs amid a concerning new social media trend.
Viral content on social media platform TikTok has seen teenagers boasting about shooting birds with catapults across the UK.
Gangs of youths across the country have been spotted using the weapon to shoot animals, leaving them dead, blinded or with shattered bones.
Police are now looking for two teenagers who were seen running away from the back garden of a house in Dorchester, Dorset, in February.
The occupants of the house heard a commotion coming from the back of their property, where they keep ducks in an enclosure.
When they went over to check on the noise, they found that three of their ducks had been shot and killed by projectiles while a fourth was seriously injured and later died.
Dorset Police believes the suspects used catapults to shoot the ducks.
Teenagers across the country have been encouraged to use catapults to target animals such as foxes, starlings, swans, parakeets and wood pigeons as part of the alarming social media trend.
A goose dies from its injuries after being shot in the head by a gang of youths in South East London in January
A fox is seen with a hole in its nose after being shot with a hard object fired by a catapult in London
Earlier this year in Bromley, London, gangs of youths used ‘ice cubes’ as ammunition to kill wild animals.
Greenwich Wildlife Network issued a desperate plea in January to the government and police to act against the assaults – after creating a petition calling for the regulation of catapults, which has so far gained more than 36,000 signatures.
The charity claimed youths may have switched from using pellets to ice cubes so that the ‘evidence melts away’ and cannot be traced back to them.
At the time, Rae Gellel, Director and Founder of Greenwich Wildlife Network, told the Daily Mail: ‘All these ice cubes were found on the floor at a location where kids had been seen shooting animals. We did theorise that it could potentially be a way of having less evidence.
‘The injuries are awful. It’s often a nut or a bolt or a battery being fired at an animal at high velocity. That would do damage to a human, but to a small animal like birds with hollow bones, it does catastrophic damage.
‘You’ve got broken bones, you’ve got missing eyes, you’ve got huge gaping wounds. It’s very common for us to see compound fractures where the bone is broken through the skin.’
In Orpington, London, nearly a dozen wild animals were tortured and killed using catapults.
The animals were also found in a state that suggested they had been ‘finished off’ after initially being stunned, an action repeatedly seen in previous cases.
A suffering swan appears blinded after sustaining an injury to its head in London
A dead pigeon found fatally injured after an attack in Orpington earlier this year
Chris Smith, a volunteer at Greenwich Wildlife Network, described feeling ‘physically sick’ after assessing images of 11 animals found shot dead in a single incident in Bromley.
Injuring or killing wild birds is illegal and offenders face a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine.
While adults can theoretically face prison under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, the volunteer said convictions are extremely rare.
‘Across Bromley, Bexley and Greenwich, we recorded 101 catapulting attacks in 2024,’ they said. ‘But across the entire UK, only 13 convictions were secured.’
Mr Smith also claimed that catapults are wrongly classified in law.
‘Catapults are classed as a toy,’ he said. ‘But they can fire projectiles at up to 136 miles per hour. If something can kill an animal outright, shatter bones and destroy eye sockets, how is that a toy?’
A Met Police spokesperson said: ‘Incidents like this are of real concern to people, and we want to reassure them that we are investigating and taking action against offenders.’
Detective Inspector Mark Harrison of the National Wildlife Crime Unit told The Telegraph: ‘These crimes are not just causing deaths and horrific injuries to wildlife. There is also a significant risk to people and property in the areas where these crimes are being committed and this normalisation of violence has further consequences as a gateway to other crimes.’
He said the unit would pursue those that shared footage of the crimes online.
