Yesterday afternoon the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published revised guidance on eating game shot with lead. It starts: ‘The Food Standards Agency is advising people that eating lead-shot game on a frequent basis can expose them to potentially harmful levels of lead. The FSA’s advice is that frequent consumers of lead-shot game should eat less…
Category: LEAD AMMUNITION
Lead poisoning still killing lots of birds and FSA advice on human health impacts ‘delayed’.
A just-published study reveals that lead gunshot is still a threat to wild waterbirds in the UK, over a decade after the use of lead gunshot was banned in wetlands and for shooting wildfowl in England ( similar but slightly different legislation pertains elsewhere in the UK). Waterfowl ingest spent lead shot whilst feeding. Sometimes…
New lead study published – what will hunters do now?
A new scientific paper on the human health impacts of lead ingestion from gamebirds shot with lead has recently been published. This study uses measured levels of lead in gamebirds on sale in the UK to estimate health impacts. Perhaps the most striking proposed impact is that for children, eating lead-shot gamebirds around once a…
Shot partridges
Today sees the publication of Dick Potts’s book on partridges. I have reviewed the book for Birdwatch so you’ll have to wait to see that for my overall assessment. But I was interested to see that lead shot came up in the index a few times. I hadn’t realised that partridges sometimes suffer from accidental…
Leading the way
Do you remember that the Shooting Times were given a copy of a WWT Council paper on their position on lead ammunition back in the spring? As I said at the time, it’s hardly surprising that a nature conservation organisation is against the use of a type of ammunition that poisons some of its victims…
Are you game?
The Spanish Agency on Food Safety and Nutrition has looked at the human health risks associated with use of lead shot in hunting. I guess Spaniards eat quite a bit more game than you and I, and that hunters eat more than non-hunters do. If you are an Andalucian game-hunter (and I guess you are…
A condor lead moment
American nature conservationists are campaigning to remove lead ammunition from the environment because it poisons species such as swans, eagles and California condors. They argue that non-toxic shot alternatives should be used. They also say that use of lead ammunition risks the health of people, particularly children, if they ingest tiny fragments of lead from…
Firing blanks
When I worked at the RSPB I got a media summary every day. I would look forward to Thursday as the Shooting Times would always deliver a few laughs. You could tell that when there wasn’t anything of great interest to write about in the shooting world they would fill their pages with lurid stories…