California bans all lead ammo for all hunting

[10 bore]

Originally Posted by King Brown

Kensal, provide sources recent research and save me worrying, please. I killed a couple skunks with the .22 last week and went to work on the property. When I came back to dispose of them a bald eagle lifted powerfully with a skunk in its claws. I'm one of the idiots who believe lead in the diet isn't good. I'm leery that all the anti-lead papers were written by liberals!


PS---Following Sherman Bell's injunction of finding out for myself, I googled "ingested lead and raptors." Every source, state and federal, cited mortality from ingested lead in raptors in Arizona, Virginia, California, Minnesota, Montana, France, Spain, including "death from one lead shot" in bald eagles. I'll leave to you the identity of which sources are liberal or conservative but I'm a new convert until shown evidence otherwise.

Regards, King

changed my mind on my post , so I deleted it

[Frank Allegra]

King,
Most varmints I have killed with a rifle have an entry and an "EXIT" hole. I don't really think I would worry too much about the lead contamination.

This new bill was nothing more than a ploy of the Humane Society to stop hunting in CA. It's like the mountain lion initiative that they were able to push to stop the hunting of mountain lion in CA. Now they complain about mountain lion attacks on joggers and trail bickers. From physics we should have learned that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

[wayne goerres]

We can only hope that the mountain lions are only eating liberals.

[King Brown]

Todd, the consensus of all of the papers and journals is the digestive juices break the lead down to enter the blood, no mention of gizzards at all.

I'm waiting for peer-reviewed papers that say otherwise. It's no service to members to say empirically there is no evidence that lead does not kill raptors.

That's a clear definition of factoid---what's said so often it becomes "fact."

Frank, I've been using .22 short mushrooms on skunks and raccoons; no exit. I'd be pleased to read from an authoritative source I have no worries about lead.

[Richard Flanders]

I have a paper at home written by an Ak fish and game biologist friend of mine that addresses this issue in detail. Ducks eat lead shot and grind it up in their gizzards and it eventually trashes their livers and kills them. It's my impression that shot ingested into a stomach is not broken down much by stomach acid before being passed out. It is however most definitely an issue when ground up in a gizzard. I'm sure I can get a link to that article from Dan and post it here at some point. I can't remember if the lead levels were elevated in the duck tissues. Have to wait until I find that article in my files.

[Kensal Rise]

Richard:
Let's start with "ducks eat lead." Okay. How do they find lead to eat? In the duck marsh? After some hunter fires a cartridge of 4s? After the 4s disperse over 150 yards of muck after whistling through the air? After dropping through who-knows-how-many feet of water? To the bottom of the marsh? Where NO duck seeks material for it's gizzard? (hint: lead does NOT "grind up" in a duck gizzard)

And... even if ALL that happened, does the SAME duck eat enough shot pellets to have any effect by the time they exit as duck crap?

I don't care if you're a biologist in AK or Bermuda, you have to be smoking some nasty hemp to believe any of that -- then put it into a "paper."

[Bruce Day]

Originally Posted by John Campbell

Richard:
......
I don't care if you're a biologist in AK or Bermuda, you have to be smoking some nasty hemp to believe any of that -- then put it into a "paper."

Why the personal attacks ?

[Kensal Rise]

Originally Posted by Bruce Day

Why the personal attacks ?

Forgive me. It wasn't meant to be personal. Only descriptive. I just get a bit piqued over this issue. Which I will hereby withdraw from.

[Richard Flanders]

Trust me - ducks ingest lead pellets. Dan's article has all the statistics on how many pellets they found in gizzards and such, complete with pictures if I remember correctly. He went around the marsh during hunting season and got hunters to let him cut out the gizzards and livers and did extensive testing. The paper is full of pictures of diseased livers and such. I'd guess that pellets settle in the mud and they get them when they pull shoots out and somehow keep them in their gizzard because there isn't much grit to be had in a muddy marsh area. I was a complete skeptic on the issue until I read his paper on it. Dan's a straight shooter and not a greenie. He hunts himself and does good waterfowl work.

[Kensal Rise]

Okay. Let's pretend what you say is true. And ducks can somehow repeatedly eat oodles of heavy lead pellets along with "shoots" they normally ingest. And they live in duck marshes frequented by hunters who shoot to the degree of a trap field.

Then we have to ask ourselves these questions:

1) Of all the ducks in all the world, what percentage of them live in active shooting marshes? And does that percentage warrant a ban on lead shot over a Kansas pothole?

2) Just because a duck has a diseased liver does that mean the disease was caused by lead.

3) Would ANY of the alleged evidence hold up in court?