The government has U-turned on guidance to shooters that reclassified pheasants as livestock, meaning that wild birds such as crows could be shot to protect them in certain circumstances, after a furious reaction from the public.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs changed the definition of livestock in its general shooting licences earlier this year. Under the new definition, game birds such as pheasants were considered livestock if given food, water or shelter by a keeper for their survival.

That meant that wild birds including carrion crows, jackdaws, rooks and magpies could be shot to protect them. General licences give broad permissions to shoot certain species of wild birds to protect livestock, help conservation and preserve public health and safety.

The legality of releasing 50 million non-native pheasants and partridges into the British countryside each year is to be challenged in the courts by a new crowdfunded campaign.

The government should be forced to carry out environmental assessments of the impact of the shooting industry’s release of game birds into the wild each year, according to Wild Justice, a campaign group led by environmentalists Mark Avery, Ruth Tingay and Chris Packham.

Lawyers for Wild Justice believe that in failing to carry out such studies, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is in breach of the EU habitats directive.

Avery said: “If you were building a supermarket near a special area of conservation or other protected area, it would be assessed for its impact on protected sites. We don’t see that there is anything different in releasing 50 million non-native birds into the countryside, a number that is going up all the time.

“There is reasonable evidence that these birds could be having an impact. People forget that pheasants go around gobbling up adders, lizards and all sorts of invertebrates. All these dead pheasants [from shooting and roadkill] are feeding foxes, carrion crows and others, which go on to eat other, rarer species.