He is young, fresh-faced, holding a gun and proud of it. But this is not a shocking pic of a feral gangster teenager on an inner-city estate – it is part of a brand new campaign launched by the Countryside Alliance to sell, to young people, the idea of a job in the shooting industry.

Not surprisingly, it has prompted an outcry from the animal rights campaigners who have long set their own sights on what they call 'the bloody business' of mass-rearing and mass-slaughtering game birds.

Since the ban on hunting, the shooting controversy – which, like hunting, has its heartland in the West – has become the new battleground between the supporters of the Countryside Alliance and the League Against Cruel Sports.

And, it seems, the Alliance and their colleagues in shooting organisations, believe they are winning the hearts and minds of the public even before any serious moves to ban or curtail the shooting industry.

For the Alliance would like to see 2008 go down as the year when shooting became 'cool', and the new campaign to kick off 2009 is further evidence of their increasing confidence in marketing shooting.

They point to a growing number of TV chefs, from Jamie Oliver to Dorset-based Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, using pheasant and partridge in almost every meal, often emphasising it as a healthy and welfare-friendly alternative to factory-farmed poultry.

Then there is film producer Guy Ritchie who successfully held on to his £8-million Wiltshire manor house during his divorce from Madonna. He has already turned it into one of Britain's top shooting estates, with the rich and famous queuing up to blast birds from the sky over the countryside of Cranborne Chase.

Also, a bearded Prince William was recently pictured shooting on one of the royals' Scottish estates, boosting the Countryside Alliance's attempts to reshape the public's image of shooting from a sport for ruddy-faced old men into one for teenagers and young people.

Its new campaign aims to encourage youngsters in rural areas into shooting for employment as well as participation. The campaign has nominated youngsters already earning their keep in the industry, dubbed Shooting Stars. They include Dan Cook, an 18-year-old gamekeeper from Brimpsfield in Gloucestershire, and New Forest stalker, Jeremy Mason, 23.

"Shooting is worth £1.6 billion to the hard-pressed rural economy and supports 70,000 jobs, often in remote areas," said Delly Everard, of the Countryside Alliance in Wessex.

"When the summer tourists go home, it is sectors like this that support the countryside, keep young people in rural areas and therefore strengthen communities.

"The campaign gives insight into the lives of people whose chosen careers depend entirely on shooting. They directly contribute to maintaining future growth of the UK's thriving shooting sector. The knock-on environmental and economic benefits of shooting have recently been praised by senior politicians of all the main parties.

"We're keen to highlight the vital contribution it makes to the rural and wider economy. By highlighting the future stars, we can prove that shooting has a bright and prosperous future ahead of it, which will have obvious benefits for the countryside.

"We want to raise awareness of the job opportunities out there, from gamekeeper to chef, shooting school manager to beater, and includes related employment in the hospitality sector, which caters for shoot tourism."

But to the League Against Cruel Sports, it is another whitewashed view of what they say is 'a bloody business'. Last year they successfully stopped an advert claiming shot game produce was 'organic' when, they point out, almost all the hundreds of thousands of birds reared for shooting spend their first few months in conditions likened to factory farming.