Abstract
There are significant negative effects of exposure to spent lead ammunition on wildlife and human health. A joint statement was issued by nine UK shooting and rural organisations on 24th February 2020 intended to encourage a voluntary transition to non-lead shotgun ammunition within five years “in consideration of wildlife, the environment and to ensure a market for the healthiest game products”. We dissected carcasses of wild-shot common pheasants Phasianus colchicus sold or offered for human consumption in Britain in the shooting season between 1st October 2020 and 1st February 2021 to recover shotgun pellets. The principal metallic element composing one pellet from each bird was identified using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry. The results showed that 99% of the 180 pheasants from which shotgun pellets were recovered had been killed using lead shotgun ammunition, compared with 100% in a much smaller study conducted in the 2008/2009 shooting season. We conclude that the shooting and rural organisations’ joint statement, and their subsequent promotional actions, have not yet had a detectable effect on the ammunition types used by shooters supplying pheasants to the British game market.
Highlights
Shooting of live quarry animals is a major activity in the UK, involving 380,000 people (PACEC 2014)
Waitrose wishes the shot types used to kill pheasants sold in their stores to be monitored, so we reported results from these separately from those obtained from other sources
All of the other shot were composed primarily of lead, including those from all 10 of the pheasants in the sample. These results indicate that the vast majority of non-wetland gamebirds shot in Britain, including pheasants, were killed using lead shotgun ammunition 12 years before the joint statement was issued in 2020
Summary
Shooting of live quarry animals is a major activity in the UK, involving 380,000 people (PACEC 2014). Since the 18th Century, lead has been the principal constituent of most of the shotgun pellets used for hunting birds and mammals under 10 kg body weight. Despite well-documented concerns about the toxicity of lead, shotgun ammunition composed principally of lead remains in widespread use in Europe, North America and elsewhere (Kanstrup & Thomas 2019). There are significant negative effects of spent lead ammunition on wildlife (Pain et al 2019) and on public health (Green & Pain 2019). Common buzzards Buteo buteo in the UK are exposed to lead from shotgun pellets when feeding, during the gamebird shooting season (Taggart et al 2020).
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