lead free shot

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I doubt the vet working the wildlife rehab here is involved in a conspiracy. What does driving a car have to do with shooting a gun? Remember leaded gas? And the foul air pollution so prevalent back in the 80s? Tightening emissions and so forth improved air quality. Every change, even small can make a noticeable difference.
 
I don't know if your vet is involved in a conspiracy or not. I don't know him. Is he a member of PETA? Look at all the doctor's with no gun signs on their offices. People all have an agenda that may or may not be related to their work. Please don't tell me you watch CNN or MSNBC because they are unbiased.
 
I despise the 'unleaded' shotgun ammo. First year we all had to use it for waterfowl, I thought the ducks had grown Kevlar feathers......
 
Steel has come a long way since the 80's its much better now, than it was back then!
With that said; I will continue to shoot lead (where legal) until the Tree Huggers and Whale Savers get their way!
I will not give up on persuing a sport I love because of an ammunition mandate, unless I just can't afford the ammo!
 
What is your opinion on using lead free shot for predator hunting? (Coyote, fox, bobcat.) What would be the best load and shot size?
 
What does driving a car have to do with shooting a gun? Remember leaded gas? And the foul air pollution so prevalent back in the 80s
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SERIOUSLY? YOU are comparing the environmental damage done from folks shooting lead to something cataclysmic, (which it isn't) and you seemed genuinely overly concerned about the environment - to me, that would mean that you should be leading by example and not using a car (of course with only 29 posts I suspect another agenda) as to the lead in the air from exhaust - MILLIONS of gallons of gasoline vaporizing the lead into a small congested urban area, versus a few folks hunting with a solid metal in wide open urban areas - YOUR correlation doesn't wash I am sorry to say.

The whole non-lead waterfowl thing came about because of Ducks Unlimited. The Feds wanted to shut down waterfowl hunting for one or two seasons on the Atlantic Flyway to see if there were any differences. DU protested, so they just banned lead. ( This told to me by a major gun writer who was heavily invested time and money-wise at the time with these studies and with DU)

The impact of hunters using lead on the environment is so miniscule as to be not measurable. The impact of off-road ATVs, gasoline powered watercraft of every size, cruise ships and coral reefs, etc. pose a far greater risk top the planet and everyone's health.
 
At the risk of going way off topic, I'll never understand the seething contempt that many outdoorsmen have for environmentalism.

Anything taken to an extreme is a bad thing, but you can't hunt or fish a toxic waste dump. Well, I suppose you can, but the results will either be sad (spending time in a barren wasteland where a forest once stood) or terrifying (realizing you don't have enough ammo to fight off the horde of sewer mutants now inhabiting your former hunting grounds).
 
The lead battery used in automobiles is one of largest user of lead. I believe that lead batteries are a responsible for a huge amount of the lead pollution we are experiencing. A couple examples;
1. Take a look at how old batteries are stored and handled. They are out side in a fenced in area exposed to the elements, piled on a pallet every which way. some upside down, some on their side. They are dead batteries susceptable to freezing, and bursting the case. They pile them there waiting for the price of lead to go up before they will sell them. The lead acid leaks out and is washed away and soaks into the ground to leach into the ground water. Lead acid solution is very toxic.
2. In the event of a auto accident the chances of a battery surviving is slim at best. All that lead acid leaks on the ground and into the ground water.
IMHO lead from shot or bullets is minor compared to batteries. Just as steel and copper are alternatives to bullets and shot, there are alternatives to lead acid batteries. They very expensive and people don't want to, and they aren't willing to pay the cost. They choose to look the other way. So if we have to change the whole lead usage consumers as a group must change. must change. Not just the paint,ammo and fishing tackle industry.
 
Lead is an inert metal. Solid lead, like batteries, will not vaporize and go anywhere, and the chunks are to big for even the California Condors to eat. I am sure Lithium will be much better. Just ask Boeing.
I have a contempt for environmentalism because I see the zealots twisting everything to try and get their way. Phoney science out the wazoo. CNN purporting that global warming is responsible for asteroids no less. Mars has warmed up more than Earth over the same period. Think maybe the Sun has something to do with everything? And most of it is about money. So many people think they are all so altruistic - heck they are a profit free organizations. Yeah, they are profit free because they pay their top officers HUGE salaries.
Ducks Unlimited was NOT the driver on steel shot. John Olin - I suspect Alzheimer's - conducted a bunch of tests using mallards and corn and shared the data with the EPA and that was the impetus they needed. The real agenda was they were hoping it would kill duck hunting, but we had more perseverance than they had imagined.
 
Eagles and Condors don't eat carrion with lead battery parts, they eat meat with chunks of lead shot or bullets. Birds often eat the same as well as fishing weights in the environment mistaking it for grit for digestion. It takes a grain of rice-sized piece of lead to kill an adult eagle. Looks like Virginian is convinced that every act to eliminate pollution in the natural world is a conspiracy to eliminate his outdoor activities. Wildlife agencies are seeing their efforts to restore America's largest bird(California Condor) being frustrated by lead poisoning. Do a little research on the web, youtube. The evidence and the consequences is knee deep with examples. Jason is right that too many people think of the outdoors as something to exploit without acknowledging any consequences of their actions. Those who would enact laws to ban entirely all fishing and hunting see the refusal to change habits in the face of evidence as self-centered. There are other living creatures in the outdoors to be considered besides the ones you can lay in the back of your pickup truck or stack up for a photograph.
 
Right now for the foreseeable future I don't think we have much choice of what type of shot we use. 100 rounds of just dirt cheap birdshot has jumped from under $20 to close to $30. A shooting club that I frequent places massive orders for AA shotshells. Distributors won't even accept their orders. Just this summer distributors sent a salesman to their ammo order meeting to pitch other products. We are talking about a club that has an FFL and they buy 100's of cases of Winchester AA ammo every month.

If the ammo industry doesn't attempt to meet demand when the panic is over they will never recover all the shooters who have found other hobbies.
 
If I hunted I may or may not, I dont know enough about how the shot works on the target. But for trap I just cant afford it, it cost 2 more bucks a box. So currently no
 
By the way, I have probably spent well over $200 million dollars installing industrial pollution control equipment. It was entirely justifiable. I have no problem with dealing with real issues. But just for example, the environmentalists are against oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, geo-thermal, hydro, just about ANY energy source you can imagine. The fact is with NO population control we are just going to keep needing more energy. And every cause is soliciting money from the uninformed.
My point about carrion eaters was that they do not have a craw quite like seed eaters. The seed eaters craw, with the gravel they pick up, grinds the food and lead, if there is any, that can get in the blood. They are also much more selective about what they pick up and eat, except for billed species like ducks.
The phoney animal lovers like PETA will be the end of wild animals. If we would allow licensed hunting of the leopards, and charge enough that they are worth more via a tag than to a poacher, THEN we might see some progress. When an African farmer can raise crops and make MORE money letting the elephants eat it and hunter's shoot a regulated number than he can for tipping off poachers, then elephant poaching will go away. Unfortunately, in the real world, money - and votes which are just a road to money - is the driving force for just about everything.
I flat out do not believe a lot of the "claims". I have seen way too many eagles eating geese shot with lead without seeing one dead eagle to believe one shot pellet in a real world setting is gonna do it. When they analyse the tissue in a dead Condor and find lead, do we KNOW it came from a bullet, or accumulated car exhaust or something else? I am highly dubious. I do not think that every effort is aimed at eliminating my outdoor activities. I do believe the zealots are anxious to do anything they can think of that they think might help things, as they see it, without regard to the consequences to anything else. It doesn't have to be proven technology, if it might be better then do it and to hell with everything else. They operate on fear tactics just like the whole advertising world. If we don do yada-yade we won't have any more Bald Eagles. Bull. When they stopped using DDT all the raptors rebounded. There are hawks sitting all over the power lines these days and millions of LEAD shotgun shells fired at doves don't seem to be hurting them one iota. A lot of them do seem to be getting hit by cars though. Maybe we need to reduce the speed limit to protect hawks. Whoops, nope, too many voters won't like that one much. By the way, if malaria had been a big issue in the United States, the raptors would probably be gone, because we would probably never have banned DDT.
The owls needed 2,000 pristine acres per pair to survive, and we were able to kill a lot of logging, which they hated anyway. And then we found the same owls living happily right in housing developments in Northern California. Too much junk science and personal agendas. I do not trust them, at all.
If they can show me hard evidence, that I can believe, then I will listen. Otherwise we are at odds.
 
You take blood and measure the level of lead in it. You do an x-ray scan and see the chunk of lead in it's belly. Virginian, do you think PETA has taken over every aspect of society? Sounds more like paranoia. I mentioned the biodegradable fishing line that was introduced a few years ago. It was pulled because the demand wasn't what they hoped for. However, people I mentioned it to, never heard of it nor saw it but though it was a great idea. I'm trying to persuade the company to reintroduce it with a better name and marketing. Its more expensive but what price do put on a land you claim to love?
 
There's a whole discussion about trade-offs that needs to happen. Recently there has been some conversation about lead and eagles/raptors, but the source was not shot; it was bullet fragments in deer. The source of the story was reasonably credible, but the underlying political position was something like "if it would save just one bird..." as opposed to "here's what we know we can prove and here's what we think this means."

The ecological and economic reality (and these are linked) is our environment is cleaner, more diverse, and more productive now than it was 100 years ago. There are more trees in the US now than there were 200 years ago, by a significant margin. There is *much* more productive "edge habitat" than there was 200 years ago as well. Modern forestry practices encourage this, and deer hunting today is more productive, meaning more hunters and more animals, than ever before in this country. Wetlands are recognized in many states as something of value that needs to be preserved, not as a swamp that needs to be filled. Much of this result is directly due to sportsmen via licenses, excise taxes on guns and ammo, and sportsmen funded groups such as Ducks Unlimited and Whitetails Unlimited.

The research and conversation that is not happening is centered around what we know, what we think we know and need to prove, and what is acceptable. Those need to be rational discussions and analyses, not emotionally driven conversations. Emotion here will only lead to undesirable unintended consequences. Please try to think in these terms. It's really in everyone's best interest, even the hardcore environmentalists that react in horror at the horror of it all. :rolleyes:
 
I burn five boxes of dove loads most opening weekends. Politely, not no, but HELL no! If lead dries up, I'll just have to quit hunting doves, I guess. Limits on ducks are lower and I rarely ever sho0ot more'n 15 or 20 rounds a morning. I have put up with steel in the marsh. Fasteel has stopped the crippling that was a problem in the past, made the stuff more effective. But, I still long for the lead shot days, 5s from a 20 gauge 2 3/4" were deadly on ducks. Now days, I leave the 20 at home and 12s in 2 3/4" is all I use on ducks, number 2 or 3 fasteel 2 3/4". I've not yet found a 3" 20 that patterns worth a toot with biggish steel shot. Takes a 12 to push enough steel in a good pattern to take a large duck consistently. Geese, I've gone to 10 gauge. I just bought a 12 gauge 3.5" last year, but haven't gotten around to buying some 3.5" steel T to pattern in it. I ain't got much hope of it out-patterning my 10, though. That thing is amazing with the big bowling ball T stuff.

Bismuth, forget it, I'd just sell my shotguns. I ain't that rich, not even for ducks and geese. I'd just stick to deer hunting, I guess. Now, trap and skeet shooters shoot a LOT of rounds, a box per round. It would stop many a working man for participating if you tripled the price of a box of ammy, I'm betting. The .410 and 28 bores would likely disappear as they would be useless with steel, the only half way affordable non-toxic.

Nope, I vote no. Of course, I bet there'll be a push considering the current state in DC, wouldn't surprise me, anyway. Just fact, if they did it and I could still get lead dove loads or lead shot to reload, I'd probably just break the law. Heck, the lead is falling on MY land, anyway and I've never been checked by a game warden while dove hunting on mine or my buddy's private land. I don't hunt public land for doves. Some laws are made to be broken or ignored. That may not seem high road to you, but it's how I feel about THIS particular subject, and gun control for that matter.
 
An observation on current non-toxic laws. I can hunt the same field iin September for doves using number 7.5 lead dove loads that I must use STEEL SHOT or some non-toxic over for geese in November. I never figured out that stupidity. Most such laws are agenda driven and rooted in stupidity. If lead is mandated for all shooting, you can bet PETA will be happy. Who's agenda do you think is driving it.

I've often though if the 10 percent of the duck population is being killed off by lead, which I'm VERY skeptical of, then why not drop the limits by 1 bird and allow lead shot? The "if just one bird" argument sickens me. Lots of birds were crippled in the 80s and 90s, lots more than would have died of lead, I'm betting, by ineffective steel shot. I learned to up shot size and go to 3", seemed to work better, but it's fasteel that really made the difference. Again, I use it on ducks, but I ain't goin' there for doves. It would be cost prohibitive.
 
I would not trust the government if they said day was light and night was dark. They are the lowest of the low in my book. It's one huge self preserving bureaucracy, and Everything goes back to some politician's agenda. The Insurance Safety Institute's "safest cars" is BS. Last week some group published the list of vehicles that averaged the lowest total accident costs, including medical bills. Shocker - full sized pickups and SUVs came out on top. 6,000 pounds is better life insurance than 3,000 pounds makes perfect sense, but how will that encourage people to buy smaller cars ! One night in an ICU will pay for a Porsche these days. Maybe I am paranoid, but I don't trust anything anymore unless I see the raw data, or I know who came up with the conclusions.
 
something is smelling phishy here. OP doesn't answer questions, just wants to preach.

Remnds me of a recent visitor named Timmy.
 
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