A couple of lessons

I’d quite like to write a book entitled ‘Advice to a young advocate’ which would give tips on how to influence the political system.  I’d not be the right person to write all of it so I’d need a few co-authors too – I wonder what Tony Juniper would think of the idea. There are…

FSA advice on eating game

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…

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…