If Grouse Guy is either a hunter or a shooter, I'm an Obama supporter. This jerk keeps creeping out of the woodwork to advance his agenda. He always gets beaten down here and stays quiet for a while, but he's like one of those battered women who keep going back to their abusive spouse. You can tell by his writing and responses that he clearly lacks the intelligence to digest and understand a journal article or scientific research paper. He just gives us a bibliography from a Google search. Mostly though, he just plain lacks any common sense. Several posts here and in the recent past lament lower numbers of pheasants, grouse, and other game birds in recent years. Here in my own state of Pennsylvania, pheasants are practically an endangered species, and grouse are quite scarce when they should be on their cyclical upswing. Yet lead contamination in the environment now is a small fraction of what it was forty years ago when game bird populations were much higher. The greatest source of lead pollution at any time in history was during this time from gasoline with tetraethyl lead. Burning it produced lead fumes and dust at an almost atomic microscopic level that was deposited on the land, water, and in the air. The amount was many many time higher than the amount of lead used by shooters. Of course, there was also much more lead pollution from industrial sources and paint. Our (and wildlife's) exposure was much greater then than what we have now with the small amount of much larger pieces of lead that hunters and shooters leave behind. So perhaps one could conclude that it is a lack of lead pollution that has given many of us lower game bird populations. If lead is a problem now, one would think that most life on earth would have become extinct then. Habitat loss is not nearly the problem in Penna. that it is in other states. This theory is certainly more sensible than a study that concludes that it is better to cripple and lose ten times as many birds with costly steel or non-tox, than would be lost due to a small number who might ingest some lead pellets. But none of this is about sensibility or factual science. It is a small, but pervasive cadre of liars who use selective "science" to advance their real agenda. The lead ban crowd is really anti-gun and anti-hunting. They are not unlike the global warming crowd who expect us to destroy our standard of living in order to redistribute wealth. Grouse Guy is not one of us. Don't fall for his crap. If he's willing to do some experiments on ingesting lead himself, I'll supply the shot.

Last edited by keith; 01/11/10 01:22 AM.
Voting for anti-gun Democrats is dumber than giving treats to a dog that shits on a Persian Rug