A solid upland gun for hunters on a budget
By Casey Sill
The phrase “you get what you pay for” works two ways.
The G-Force Arms GF5 Filthy Pheasant is not your grandpa’s heirloom side-by-side — but it doesn’t need to be. Retailing online at just a shade under $400, you could buy damn near seven Filthy Pheasants for the cost of an average high end double gun. And in the age of endless fancy upland garb, it’s downright refreshing to run across a shotgun that a teenage kid can save up for in one summer bagging groceries down at the local Piggly Wiggly.
I shot the 20 gauge version of the Filthy Pheasant, with 28” barrels, a nice, high vent rib and extended choke tubes. Weighing in at just over six pounds, the gun is easy to carry and doesn’t beat you up too bad, even with heavier shot. The wood is as good as you can hope for in a $400 gun, and I love the extended tubes because, honestly, they make me feel fancy.
I shot a round of sporting clays with the Filthy Pheasant in September, and over the course of two weeks in mid-October hunted ruffed grouse in northern Wisconsin and sharptail in eastern Montana with it. Through both trips, the gun performed admirably, despite my overall propensity for bad luck. It functions well and pulls up just as smoothly as over-and-unders worth five times as much. It’s tough and no-nonsense — befitting of its name. It’s got attitude, and I like that. The downsides were small and mostly insignificant. But in the spirit of full disclosure, let’s run through them.
It was very difficult to open, beyond the normal breaking in a new gun needs. But that’s small potatoes in the grand scheme, and some grease on the action fixed it right up. The only other issue was with the safety and barrel select — The side-to-side barrel select was simply not the smoothest and jammed up on me once. Outside of that, the gun punched above its weight class in almost every respect.
While carrying it, I kept thinking about how much I would’ve loved to have something like this when I was a kid. It’s the perfect entry into the double gun arena for anyone who wants the classic look but doesn’t want to commit big dollars to a new firearm or whose dad won’t let them within a quarter mile of their gun safe. Not that I blame the dad’s for that, I certainly would’ve found a way to lose, break or otherwise destroy an expensive gun when I was 16. But here lies a potential solution in the Filthy Pheasant — a shotgun best suited to new and young hunters who want to look the part without breaking the bank.
So go ahead, scratch the wood, get mud on the buttstock, drop this thing in a cattail swamp.
Buy a Filthy Pheasant and use it — that’s what shotguns are for.
Casey Sill is the senior public relations specialist at Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at csill@pheasantsforever.org.