Fact - nobody has died from eating lead shot game. - how can you support this fact?
Frankly the views expressed are pretty much now irrelevant. The powers that be - ie the Health and Safety Executive and the UK Reach regulations have taken the view that lead should be removed from the environment and that there is no safe level of exposure.
The NRA has been able to demonstrate that target shooting into bullet catchers has minimal effects on the wider environment provided the butts are regularly deleaded and thus can continue.
But the wider shooting community has not been able to demonstrate or provide evidence to the enquiries that lead in the wider environment is not harmful.
In the opinion of the Government Minister in the decision to ban lead on page 2, clause 6
“Lead is a toxic element……..No safe concentration level of lead exist, lead always has a negative effect on human health”
You, along with many of us, have been using lead free bullets for many years. Steel shot has been used over wetlands and for bird shooting in many other countries for decades. They work. Yes they have their limitations at the extremes of range and might not yet be readily available in all calibres and bores so we might have to make adjustments.
But as part of the shooting and conservation community - and yes they go absolutely hand in hand, I cannot understand some elements of the community are so resistant to switching away from using a material that causes great harm.
Or is it simply that such individuals don’t care about the effect of their shooting has on others and the wider environment.
We do live in a society that is anti shooting. We do need to bring the rest of society with us. But how can we do so when on a shoot day we scatter on of the most toxic elements known to man widely across our countryside??
130 years ago game keepers pretty much made extinct many bird species, in particular birds of prey, from the British Countryside. Now most Game Keeper’s are the custodians of the country side and we quite rightly are proud of the work that has been done bringing back harriers, ospreys etc to the British countryside. Yet will still put 30grams of lead shot into the environment everytime we squeeze the trigger.
That lead goes into the environment - it breaks down into our soils, is picked up by organisms and gets into the food chain. Studies of woodcock have shown they eating worms with high lead content.
Lead is no longer getting onto our fields and woods from lead in fuels, lead levels in agro chemicals and fertilisers are non existent. The only source is from shooting.
The shooting organisations pushed for a voluntary change in our behaviour. Some did, but many shooters just want ti carry on. The HSE in their reports suggest that the shooting community cannot self regulate, hence the reasoning for the complete ban on most uses of lead ammunition.
Clay pigeon shooting could easily continue using lead, but the opinion of government is that many will simply clay cartridges to shoot game. Given the views of many on here, I cannot blame the powers that be for taking this view and banning the sale and use of all lead shot cartridges.