What a self defeating attitude, surely the drive to eat British game begins at the shoot table.
Exactly, if shots don't do it themselves then who else will?
Big commercial shooting does have a lot to answer for ( speaking as someone who does Adair bit off picking up on them) and really the industry has grown far to quickly.
There is a lot of talk about positive PR and even the toxicity of lead, but in reality it's all pretty much all bull.
The rabid antis don't care! It is that simple. Any positive PR is soon forgotten. It's only taken a couple off decades to stop the completely false releasing grouse headline every 12 aug.
We have to be fighting and defending everything.
This has completely opened the floodgates quite needlessly and not been fully thought about at all ( esp in rifle and air guns) which will have wide spread implications. This will spread throughout all aspects off shooting relatively quickly now
Yes lead is toxic but is more toxic in some forms than other, and in its solid state is as less toxic as it can be and is pretty harmless.
As has been said previously by others they're has never ever been a death directly due to lead shot ingestion ( unlike smoking, drinking, driving, fast food and processed food amount hundreds of other things which are acceptable but have clear scientific proof of there negative effects )
Even cultures with subsistence hunting while lead levels were higher they were no where near dangerous levels
My old house had a lead water supply pipe, house sat empty for 6 -8 months, tap was never run, I took a sample off tap water to send away as if over a certain concentration u either got a grant or done for nothing replacing to the main ( about 30 ish m). The reading hardly registered and nowhere near grant levels.
And soluble lead is in 1 off its more dangerous forms.
Supermarkets are a white elephant and will never stock or sell much game,too much potential negative PR.they will drop it as soon as the 1st protest comes
I also spent 1 summer digging up silt on shooting ponds for my dissertation into lead shot, never found a pellet and these ponds have been shot for decades and decades and quite decent numbers of duck.
With wildfowl there are real scientific/documented issues with wildfowl ingesting lead pellets/shot, as there feeding in shallows and thinking the shot is the seed there feeding on.
From memory ( and it was a while ago now
) there was a study off magpie geese in OZ with very high mortality rates as their primary feed source was the same size as the shot u used to shoot them.
