Farming Today last Saturday morning had a discussion about shooting between Andrew Gilruth of GWCT and Pat Thompson of RSPB. Pat did very well but it’s more interesting to listen to Gilruth I think. He rarely answers the question. He reminds me so much of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s performance in Parliament yesterday evening – smooth, unruffled, sounding quite knowledgable and at first impression appears to have an answer for everything, but if you do listen carefully then he actually has a deflection for everything rather than an answer for anything. What was Gilruth’s answer to whether there needs to be a review of the impacts of non-native gamebird releases? He didn’t actually say did he? And when did Jacob Rees-Mogg first learn of the plan to prorogue parliament? He didn’t actually say did he?
And both Gilruth and Rees-Mogg resort to personal comments when on the spot – Rees-Mogg against Letwin and Soames and Gilruth telling Dr Pat Thompson, a scientist with a string of scientific papers to his name, not to be silly and to get into the science. What a nerve from the GWCT spin doctor.
It’s worth listening again (click here) to try to identify who actually answers the questions. It’s notable that the GWCT and Moorland Association both employ spin doctors, practised in deflecting questions deftly, rather than fielding scientists to answer questions.
But one of the more interesting parts of the programme was the former gamekeeper from near Bala in Wales, Duncan Sinclair-Willis (see here), who criticised the current state of game shooting and described it as moving from a community with standards to an industry with interest only in the bottom line. Well done him!
Sadly, the standard of research on Farming Today is as poor, or as biased, as ever. The programme opened with the tired old PACEC report and its flawed estimate of £2bn value of shooting and failed to mention that two thirds of the shooting days covered in that report are target shooting and indoor shooting and have nothing whatsoever to do with the game shooting that was what this programme then discussed. Shoddy.
The game processor was not asked what damage pigeons are currently doing to crops and what measures he was taking to make sure that his suppliers were, at this time of year, acting lawfully under the current general licences. And when it was claimed that pigeon was a really healthy bird not one question on lead content to the supplier of meat to the public. That was left to Pat Thompson to bring up and Andrew Gilruth to ignore (again). Farming Today must know that lead is a poison, and must know that lead-shot game (whether or not pellets are removed) is high in lead. But they don’t put these points to the industry feeding us meat with high lead levels. Shoddy again.
Great ending by Pat – listen to that and give him a cheer, but the bit that will stick in the mind longest is that short interview with the former gamekeeper from Wales. Big cheer for him.
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I listened to Farming today most mornings last week and I think, if I remember correctly that they had a short piece on game shooting every morning.
I too was gobsmacked at how blatantly biased the programmes where towards game shooting and how the real facts where nicely ignored or swept under the carpet.
I had to stop myself from ranting at the radio!
Yes, I listened to it live and thought Pat was very good, and so nice to hear someone from RSPB on the subject. I too noticed the lack of mention about lead… but the little features of the gamekeeper and the gameprocessing would have been recycled form editions aired during the week- I haven’t had chance to go back and see if lead was mentioned in those…….But my take-home was that Gilruth and his clan are still head-in-the-sands blinkered reading out what they want to believe in, despite all questioning and evidence to the contrary. I actually thought the programme editors had put more effort in than normal with this subject. Maybe I was just imagining that.
There is no doubt that the standards of the BBC have been sinking lower and lower over recent years as well as failing to present balanced views through lack of real knowledge of the subject they are presenting. Farming today is a very good example. Their scientific capabilities are lamentable. Obviously one cannot be sure but I doubt if they have a single correspondent/journalist on their staff that is well qualified scientifically such as having a PhD and membership of a leading professional institute.
It was very interesting that James Burke who lead the BBCs presentation of the Apollo space programme came from their humanities department not there scientific section if they now have one.
The BBC are constantly failing to get to grips and understanding with real science and are far too concerned with presenting hype. This means that trying to argue science on there programmes is very difficult when the opponent is trying to rubbish it and the BBC interviewer has effectively no knowledge of the subject.
I had an interesting brief chat with Tom Fielden, the only member of today programme team who has a science background a couple of months ago, mostly abotu how badly that ‘Flagship’ coves science and the environment. he openly admitted it was down to everyone else working on the show having an Oxbridge PPE background (and thats not person protective equipment in this case) and was very unlikely to change anytime soon. I am sure it is generally true of many of the other programmes true, although I believe that one of the farming presenters does farm a bit or has done…….Some of the more specialist environment/science output (which is diminishing rapidly in terms of new output) has real science background presenters, but those are never current affairs/discussion programmes.
Good programme, shame about the keeper diverting the talk away from grouse, which the
conversation had mainly been about, up until then, to criticise Pheasant releases.
I would like to believe you that game shot with lead is such a very big health issue, if you have real world evidence please post a link.
Because my prescription is that nobody has dropped down dead as a result of eating lead shot game and for a very many years our water was supplied via lead pipes so is their historic evidence of how many people died of drink tap water. Real world just does not appear to demonstrate a heath issue, unlike say smoking.
John – you need to catch up a bit. Put ‘lead’ into the search function on this blog and you will find scores of posts on the subject most of which take you to the report of the Lead Ammunition Group, the NHS advice on eating lead, the Food Standards Agency advice etc etc etc Or wait a while and I guess another post will revisit this subject soon.
John – you might be interested (or probably not) in this:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30025-2/fulltext
The paper is titled ‘Low-level lead exposure and mortality in US adults: a population-based cohort study.’ You only have to read the Summary. A quick quote: ‘The population attributable fraction of the concentration of lead in blood for all-cause mortality was 18·0% (95% CI 10·9–26·1), which is equivalent to 412 000 deaths annually.’
You would not expect to see people dropping like flies and the cause of death being reported as lead poisoning from these low lead levels, but it is a hidden killer of massive proportions, apparently responsible for about 18% of all adult deaths.
thank you for the link to the lancet I am not that technically skilled but searching the document I can find no references to lead shot or ammunition. It talks about “lead exposure” which could come about from many sources, it was not that long ago lead was in petrol as a lubricant it may still be the case in the USA.
I was looking for a direct correlation between eating occasionally game shot with lead and death or serious heath issues as a consequence. And yes I am interested and openminded about it.
Mark we all know the lead ammunition group fell apart and is certainly not reliable evidence.
John – we don’t all know that becuase that isn’t true. Yes, it fell apart when the pro-shooting non-scientiists flounced out, but yes it is reliable as it is packed with refereeed scientific papers. Not only are you ‘not technically skilled’ but despite that you have decided you know better than those who are technically skilled.
No mark not at all as said open minded
Just found
https://markavery.info/2016/03/09/fsa-response-lead/
So 23% of BASC members eat game once or twice a week so how many are having health issues as a result?
Certainly nobody I know, all be it that is a small sample of the 155,000 members.
To me swapping to steel shot is the issue of having to use plastic wads. I guess we all die of something and possible not old age and if we worried about all that is said we would never do anything and live a very simple boring life.
Even vegans and vegetarians have problems
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49579820
John – you can’t possibly know whether increased lead levels are having health impacts of BASSC members, can you. The medical evidence suggests they will be. It’s not as though a limb will fall off in public to signal the impact!
They were technically skilled in charge of Chernobyl and looked what happened their.
Some time hands on experience can be of greater value than a scientist stuck behind his desk.
john – basically, you don’t care about the science, that’s clear.
Not true Mark, you no nothing about my life so don’t be so patronising.
We all know yours as you like to tell all, just may be on a media that would not be available if not for the likes of me.
john – basically, you don’t care about the science, that’s clear.
John – sorry to be slow in getting back to you. Perhaps I should have said a bit more about the Lancet paper I referred to.
The study was concerned with levels of lead that might either have gone undetected with older analysis techniques or had been ignored because it was assumed that they were too low to be of any importance. It concluded that these very low lead levels, from a range of sources, were the underlying cause of a huge number of deaths due to different illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes. None would have gone down as traditional ‘lead poisoning’ (which relates to the short-term effect of very high lead levels) on the death certificates.
The obvious implication is that exposure to lead should be kept to an absolute minimum – there is no level so low that it can be regarded as safe. Unless you believe that lead derived from lead shot is somehow magically different from lead from all other sources, eating meat killed using lead shot will increase the risk of death from a range of illnesses.
You ask how many BASC members have died from regularly eating lead-shot meat. The likely answer based on this study is that a significant proportion of them will die earlier than they otherwise would have done, from cardiovascular and other diseases, but none will show obvious signs of acute lead poisoning. An even higher proportion may experience other, non-fatal health issues.
This study looked only at adults – the health risks of low-level lead exposure in young people (and pregnant women) have been known about for years.
It just depends on how irresponsible you want to be.
Alantwo, thank you for information, I know mark kept on at me for ignoring the science, but I was trying to scope the risk to a “typical” individual, like myself eating occasional game meats shot with lead. The lancet paper to me was very technical, and the food standards agency advice very simplistic. However I have found
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200792
Which talks about extreme consumers of game meat being most at risk, pregnant women and children under seven years of age. None of these apply to me.
The biggest group at risk are the hunter and hunters family eating large/extreme quantities of game.
So clearly retailers like Waitrose who are unable to control who and how much somebody eats after they sell it are doing the sensible thing, and yes mark listening to the science, by ensuring from 2020/21 only game killed with non-toxic shot is sold to the consumer.
And as I said before I am sure others retailers will then follow which hopefully will be good for all.
John – the FSA advice is not simplistic, it is simple. There is no safe level for eating lead – that’s why the advice is to avoid it.
And it would be easy to avoid it, and to reap the undoubted benefits of eating game meat (compared with farmed meat) if only the shooting industry voluntarily switched to non-toxic ammunition or if government did its job and made that happen through regulations.
But you’re not at all ‘interested and open minded’ are you, or you would ask yourself some interesting and open minded questions about what you have just read about lead and follow these up with some further enquiry – maybe even, as a small concession, draw some interesting and open minded conclusions about the balance of probabilities and a precautionary approach.
You really just want to sit in your corner and waste everyone’s time trying to address your ‘real world’ approach which appears to be that if you haven’t seen it, it doesn’t exist. Pretty much sums up the ‘Countryside’.
I have but do not shoot very much game so consider the risk from lead to be tiny compared with other risks in life.
You have a sample of 155,000 so why not engage with BASC and get the 23% that claim to eat game once or twice a week to have a blood test to see what the level of lead is within real people regularly eating game.
I know one person who worked with lead and was concerned so had his GP check his lead level and the conclusion was he had nothing to worry about. Yet he had been commercial making lead sea fishing weights for many years.
We are all very risk adverse these days and hence precautionary approach, but overall the risk of lead poisoning from eating a balanced diet that includes a little game shot with lead shot looks to be low risk when a lot will think nothing of drinking alcohol, smoking, vaping, eating junk food or even taking illegal drugs.
But the message is getting herd as Waitrose is to stop selling game shot with lead in 2020/21.
John – that has been suggested but no take up from shooters. The switch to non-toxic shot has been carried out by other shooting communities – some of which clearly are more public spirited than UK shooters. The UK shooting industry promotes game meat consumption knowing of the health risks thus increasing its own profits at the expense of affecting public health. Do you wonder that shooting is under increasing scrutiny.
Mark, you are fighting against an historic way of life and peoples jobs. I agree we do not help ourselves. Certainly what ever the risks are of eating lead shot game should be made clear to consumers so they can then make an educated decision. Consumer power will then drive change as with Waitrose and I bet other suppliers will follow.
Bet Rather than change they will then sell them outside the UK to countries with lower food standards.
You come across as trying to use the non toxic shot as a back door way of banning shooting.
Just because one shoots does not mean one agrees with all that is done in the name of shooting, quite the opposite on many occasion.
I don’t agree with driven grouse shooting or think much of pheasant and partridge shooting (haven done it) but do respect the freedom people have in this country to choose if they want to participate in it or not.
But this should never be at the expense of committing illegal acts like killing birds of prey for example and the shot game must enter the food chain otherwise it’s just not justifiable.
One needs to respect the individuals choice or where will it all end?
I don’t drink alcohol or smoke do you? Would you like me trying to ban the sales of all alcohol and cigarettes? After all I bet it costs the NHS considerable more than lead poisoning and non alcohol, vaping options are available. Plus the social issues of drunken behaviour costing police time and money.
But that’s just my opinion.
John – wanting to ban poisonous lead shot cannot possibly be equated with banning shooting. the Danes stopped using lead shot decades ago and shoot the blazes still out of all sorts of wildlife. So, you talk rubbish. Wanting to see an end to shooting poisonous metal into food cannot be equated with wanting to see an end to shooting.
I won’t comment on how you come across, but I do have a view. But I still tolerate your comments here – maybe because you are helping to dig the hole for lead use (and actually for shooting as a whole, even though that is not my particular interest).
You go ahead and try to ben alcohol and cigarettes – that won’t worry me. Of course, both cannot be sold (or in most cases given) to minors as opposed to lead despite the NHS and FSA advice for pregant women not to eat lead-shot game meat (notr feed it to children). Good point – shall we move in that direction? You start the campaign and I’ll come in behind you.
Mark one country banned lead shot then did a u turn did they not?
Banning lead shot would make small gauge guns like 28ga and .410 obsolete.
I am neither for or against steel shot, however at this time my preference is for lead shot. If by exploring how the change to steel may come about I,e, by consumer power is helping you then so be it.
As any legislation is not likely for a very long time.
You must live in a different country to me if you don’t think children and pregnant women are not drinking and smoking, you need to get out more. NHS advice has been for pregnant women not to smoke for years but some choose to.
I think the point you missed or I failed to get across is that this is a free country and individuals have the choice to decide on how they want to live their life and what their chosen poison is.
john – basically, you don’t care about the science, that’s clear because once you cannot argue with the science you then shift your ground to it being a matter of free choice. It’s only a matter of free choice if people are freely made aware of the consequences and that is not what the shooting industry does. Promoting lead-shot game meat as healthy is like the tobacco industry promoting fags as lung-clearing. And there are sonsequences for all of us if people use the NHS because of their knowing or unknowing eating of lead-heavy game meat.
Where are you going next? Back to the beginning?
The fact is that lead ammunition is unnecessary for your hobby of shooting and yet the shooting industry continues to use lead through choice and impose it on others who have not had any say in the matter.
It’s not a case of not caring about the science because if you listen every time a new science on this or that item of food was published we would all be living on lettuce leafs and drinking water.
My simplistic view is provided you eat a balanced diet, meat, vegetables, fruit etc then any single one of them is very unlikely to kill you.
So just how many kg of game meet would one person need to eat such that it then kills 412,000 people a year?
So your way forward is to educate the people buying and eating the lead shot game like the campaigns for smoking as you will have a long wait for legislation or a voluntary change within the shooting industry as I bet they dispute the science.
john – basically, you don’t care about the science because it doesn’t suit your view. You asked for evidence and now you want to ignore the massive evidence that exists.
Mark the FSA do not say avoid it as I read it
https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/lead-shot-game
Eating lead-shot game on a frequent basis can expose consumers to potentially harmful levels of lead. Those who eat lead-shot game should minimise the amount they eat, especially for small game animals.
Ie minimise which is not quite the same as avoid.
But I do agree minimise is open to interpretation, but looks like consumer power via Waitrose will ensure a move away from lead shot for game that enters the game dealers as they will not find a market for it otherwise.
Same principle as selling shot pigeons to zoo parks they will only take them if shot with steel.
John – then you should read it again ‘Consuming lead is harmful, health experts advise to minimise lead consumption as much as possible’, ‘There is no agreed safe level for lead intake. Independent scientific expert groups across the European Union advise that exposure to lead should be reduced as far as possible’ and ‘Those who eat lead-shot game should minimise the amount they eat, especially for small game animals.’.