This is an interesting paper which looks at the attitudes of a small sample (30) of male shooters to lead ammunition. It’s something called a Q-study – something unfamiliar to me.
As I understand it, the study chose the group of respondents not to be representative of the shooting community, but in fact to represent something of the range of views from well-informed participants in game shooting.
There are two camps, which I’d identify as the dinosaurs and the enlightened. The dinosaurs simply don’t believe the science, don’t believe other shooters’ experience of using non-toxic ammunition and seem to believe that shooting at live prey with non-toxic ammunition is the end of shooting. Well, that’s what they say they believe – I wonder whether they really do. Saying ‘I believe all the science but I don’t give a damn’ is unlikely to be a common response on this issue.
The enlightened group sound very sensible. If they were numerous, vocal and active then this issue would soon be ended.
So the question is ‘how many dinosaurs are there, and how many enlightened?’. We don’t know the answer to that and I wonder how we would find out. One way to get a feel for it would be to look at what the leadership of pro-shooting organisations like BASC, GWCT, Countryside Alliance and Moorland Association say – they don’t say anything enlightened on this subject and remember that their representatives behaved appallingly on the Lead Ammunition Group when they had the chance actually to do something enlightened. Another way to get a feel for the ratio of dinosaurs to enlightened would be to look at the shooting press – but that is like a trip to the Jurassic Age.
So, it seems, that the dinosaurs are in charge. And Defra sits idly by – it seems that their major nature conservation achievement is the protection of dinosaurs.
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I have recently come to the view that anything involving a change for the better in the way our environment is managed concerning the hunting and shooting cabal needs to be imposed and their generally archaic or plain wrong views should NOT be taken into account. Whether that is lead ammunition, what species are on the general licence, gun licensing, shoot licensing, wildlife crime solving etc matters not a sensible pragmatic solution to all of these is what is needed, the complete opposite to that of the dinosaurs and head in the sand merchants. Their views are beyond redemption and have no credence at all.
This question seems to me to be a good test of the true motivations of shooters and their representatives. Anyone with even a smidgen of concern for the environment would accept that the continuing use of lead shot is a damaging anachronism. So long as shooting interests refuse to campaign for a ban, they betray themselves as acting in bad faith when they proclaim their concern for conservation and the environment.
It’s an inconvenient truth, like Climate Change. Not many are sufficiently shameless to say ‘yes, I know its true, but I’m carrying on anyway’. If they did that, they’d have to admit to themselves what an utterly selfish person they are.
The real reason for the insistence on shooters still using lead shot is complex.
On one level it is about a vested interest group which has unusual influence, and ordinary shooters resisting any further regulation of them. However, on a deeper level there is a different angle to this narrative.
Old English shotguns by the likes of Purdey, Holland and Holland et al, are incredibly expensive and valuable. These are the valued heirlooms of the senior members of the aristocracy, the Royal Family, Britain’s wealthiest landowners. The one thing which allows these people to carry on using these old shotguns is the availability of lead ammunition. Non-toxic ammunition cannot be used with them. In other words the complete banning of lead shot, would mean that these shotguns cannot be used.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the vested and personal interests of the most senior members of the British establishment are aligned with the peculiar resistance to banning lead shot. Look at how rapidly lead fishing weights were banned when it was found that they were involved in the lead poisoning of waterfowl. But these were coarse anglers, working class anglers, and not senior members of the establishment. This ban took place in 1987, and an angler would typically use the lead shot in one or two shotgun cartridges in a whole year.
Certain individuals within the system have massive influence when it comes to lobbying in favour of the personal interests.
In 1987 the Govt banned the sale of lead fishing weights used in course fishing to protect water fowl.
Course fishing is probably the UK’s most popular outdoor activitity but not one popular with the land owning classes.
So it would seem that Govt is prepared to do the right thing when dealing with an activity popular with proles but not when it effects the gentry.
Yes, I agree and this is what I was saying. When the government banned lead weights, or more specifically split shot mainly used for coarse fishing, it happened within about 18 months of the evidence for lead poisoning in Mute Swans becoming known. At the time the alternatives to split lead shot were very poor.
I remember all this well because I was a coarse angler at the time. Typically even the keenest angler would only use a couple of ounces of lead shot per whole fishing season. Most of this shot was re-used and not dumped on the banks of waters where fishing takes place. Whereas each shotgun cartridge contains over 1 ounce of lead, and 100% of it is discharged into the environment, and never collected and disposed of. What’s more in a day, a shooter may use scores of cartridges. In other words on a typical days shooting a group of shooters will spray kilos of lead into the environment. Individual shoots will over time dump tonnes of lead into the environment. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the use of split shot by anglers ever was.
Since the lead shot ban in angling in 1987 shooters have discharged gigantic amounts of lead into the environment. Self-evidently the reason for this disparity is not evidence of harm, but that coarse angling was mainly an activity of the lower classes, and those who need lead shot for their old English shotguns are the most senior members of the establishment.