doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com non-toxic factory dove loads for 16 ga

Read it again. I understand that you will deny everything that does not fit your agenda, but at least make your denial fit with the actual written words. You look doltish when you deny things that weren't even written.

Keith is correct on the total insolubility of elemental lead in water.
It is the free lead ions that have been shown to be powerful neurotoxins that damage tissues, organs, immune systems and reproductive systems in animals.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485653/

I never claimed that lead is not a neurotoxin in birds, or mammals for that matter. My point was to say that virtually all lead shot deposited on a field will still be there a hundred years from now. The problem is vastly overblown by anti-lead ammunition advocates like BrentD. The very worst source of bio-available lead in the environment was stopped when we went to unleaded gasoline for vehicles. And there were many other sources of millions of tons of bio-available lead such as paints, pesticides, other chemicals, dust and fumes from smelters before pollution controls, etc.

KY Jon was correct about the sheer amount of lead shot-fall on Argentinian dove fields versus here in the U.S. He is also correct to point out that any lead shot that has sunk even 1/4 or 3/8 of an inch below the surface is lead shot that will never be ingested by a dove. And any tillage in an agricultural field is going to cause a lot more dense lead shot to go deeper over time than it leaves on the surface. Lead is known to cause reproductive harm, yet doves in Argentina continue to fly healthy and reproduce by the hundreds of millions. Several guys here who have dove hunted there have also witnessed eagles that feast upon doves wounded by lead shot, without any apparent dire threat to the survival of the species.

BrentD obviously still doesn't have any suspicions about the data in the abstract he posted yesterday. He doesn't see anything unusual in the numbers, where the total amount of shot in the top 3/8 inch of soil precisely quadrupled (to the pellet!) in just one short two day hunt, and the amount deposited in the last hunt was 24 times the previous annual average.

It should be obvious that the so-called researchers were simply pulling numbers out of the air, and hoping everyone was stupid enough to swallow the obvious horse shit.

I can remember all those gut wrenching pictures of supposedly lead poisoned ducks and geese before the Federal lead shot ban was enacted. The lead shot that was used in those areas has not been cleaned up, and it did not go away. If any "free ions" from over a century of lead shot use were problematic, as Hal has suggested, then the death and dying should still be happening on a grand scale. Yet the lead poisoning epidemic in waterfowl somehow pretty much just stopped all of a sudden. And lets not forget that many of those ducks and geese are still doing an annual migration, and spending significant time in countries where lead shot has not been banned for waterfowl. Now the new poster-child has become eagles that supposedly eat deer gut piles and varmint carcasses that are filled with lead bullet fragments.

Lead ammo bans are nothing more than a back-door approach to gun control. Making the cost of shooting prohibitive will naturally lower participation in the shooting sports, and slowly change the culture to one that is more likely to accept gun control. The dots are there, if you are intelligent enough to connect them.

When soil is tilled and then rained on, the smaller, lighter particles like silts and clays often wash away or go downward, leaving larger, heavier particles like sands and pebbles at or near the surface. Strong winds will also blow away the light particles. Wouldn't lead pellets also tend to be left on the surface?
I think its a different story in wetlands where the pellets would work their way downward through the soft, usually undisturbed, bottom sediments. As an old waterfowler, I would like to believe the switch to non-toxics has lessened lead poisoning in ducks, especially those that root around in bottom sediments to feed. Ditto with swans that now are so abundant we have a season on them (we are roasting mine on Thursday).

As questionable as some of the lead poisoning studies may be, there have been so many of them now involving so many species, as well as those dealing with human ingestion of wild game, that I am ready to throw in the towel and go unleaded.
It might even help tone down the gun-grabbers and anti-hunters by taking away one of their old, highly exaggerated talking points.

No Hal, the lead pellets will work their way downward through the looser surface soil particles until they hit the harder clay layer, in soils that have such strata. We do here. Wind on the surface, rainfall impact, freezing and thawing, the movement of machines and equipment on the surface, foot traffic ....... all will cause slight agitation of the surface particles allowing the much denser lead to sink. Even the workings of earthworms through the subsurface layer will hasten the downward movement of lead. Some types of soil tillage in agricultural lands will effect the same, especially discing. The one tillage operation that would return lead to the surface would be bottom plowing, which reverses the soil profile and brings up a deeper layer of soil to the surface. However, rainfall and traffic soon causes the same previous profile to return, and the pellets have worked their any back down again.

I would be willing to bet that, in most soils, free falling lead pellets will actually bury themselves slightly beneath the surface upon impact with the bare soil. Not so where there is a ground cover.

I have witnessed the extraordinary number of predators that feed on dove carcasses in C�rdoba. With the tens of thousands of doves that are eaten there every night, killed by lead pellets, there shouldn't be a scavenging predator left, that is if the lead pellets they ingest are so deadly to raptors, reptiles and mammals. Got my doubts.

SRH

Have my doubts about your theory of constantly and rapidly sinking pellets. It is obvious that heavier objects are left behind when soil erodes from wind or water. Time for a test in sandy, silty, and clayey agricultural soils under various cultivation techniques.
And I'd guess that both lead and steel shot would pass through the digestive system of coyotes with no loss of mass, rendering the consumption of dove carcasses mostly harmless. I have never heard of a wild fox or coyote that was shown to have died from lead poisoning.

I didn't see where Stan said that the downward migration or sinking of those heavy dense lead pellets was "rapid".

I wasn't going to comment when I saw your post last night. It seemed obvious that you have your mind made up, specific gravity of lead, and the non-stop efforts of anti-gun and anti-lead ammunition advocates be damned.

But let's look at an even denser metal, gold. There is a reason why the vast majority of gold is found well below the earth's surface. Like lead, whether it is molten or in solid form, over time, it sinks. Free lead is seldom found in nature, so gold is a good example. The small amount of gold that is found on or near the surface is typically from meteorites, or blasted to the surface during volcanic activity. Being so dense, it immediately begins to sink into the earth, or is washed into creeks and rivers where it again falls into cracks or depressions in the rocks or bedrock.

This is the same reason that artifact hunters search for ancient Indian arrowheads and spear points in plowed fields. Over hundreds or thousands of years, most tend to sink into the soil, since flint is more dense than soil. Plowing brings them back up to the surface, and the rains wash them off and make them visible for a while... until they move back under the surface once again. Frost heaving may also bring up rocks or flint artifacts, etc., but these will also sink again over time.

I'm pretty sure that you will not be convinced by any number of examples. That's OK, so long as most people understand. Fishermen learned long ago to use light wood or hollow plastic for bobbers because they float... and they use lead for sinkers and jig heads because they sink. I know that density thing is a pretty tough concept to grasp... do you perhaps have a brother named BrentD?

Anyone ever done the chicken and shot test? You need one chicken, any breed will do, and one lead shot pellet. Drop the pellet right in front of the chicken, they will often seize it in mid air, or, pounce on it when it hits the ground.
Then, they will spit it out. Every, single, time.
Nobody has ever been able to explain to me how a domestic chicken can recognize that a lead shot is not food, or, grit, but, wild birds are supposedly eating lead shot.

Best,
Ted

Bio-availability of lead is a winnable argument if presented with some knowledge of the subject. As a geologist (and an EPA contractor for many years) working on historic mine-sites and in mineral-rich regions, I've seen that fight up-close and personal. Mining companies have had their own contractors doing the science and winning the cases as they were brought by the various Federal and State Agencies. I've read the studies of pigs being fed the various forms lead-contaminated foods (lead oxides, carbonates, sulfides, metallic, etc.) and watched that fight transpire in the court system. The mining companies won that one outright and further lead-regulations were curtailed. But...the drumbeat continues, never mind the science. When smelting was largely discontinued in this country and lead was removed from both gasoline and paints, any real threat to public health was effectively eliminated. It is clearly a back-door attack on our 2nd Amendment and hunting rights. Nothing more, nothing less.

Damn I had a long reply typed and somehow lost it to some editing function.
Just wanted to tell Keith that is exactly how sluice boxes work..heavier stuff stays behind when water flows across the load. Same thing should hold when wind or water erode soils, no? Has nothing to do with heaviest elements sinking towards the Earth's center when it was a molten ball. I think most gold comes from upheavals of Earth's crust through plate tectonics.

Wanted to mention I found one of the oldest types of human artifacts in North America, a Folsom spear point, lying on the surface on some sandy, never cultivated prairie in extreme SE WY. Shiny one topside, calcified on bottom. So it was still only half sunk after many thousand years.

Lloyd what happened to the pigs fed lead carbonate and lead sulfide? Were the concentrations fed expected to be toxic?