My question is "Assuming a total ban on lead projectiles, ten years later, how could we possibly know the difference?"
The pro-banners have no answer to that, because they can't - because they haven't - currently demonstrate any harm to human health or any decline in the species they claim are being affected.
Has anything as massive as the lead ban - impacting millions, in this generation and successive ones, and costing billions - ever been done on such slender evidence.
There was ample evidence behind bans on leaded petrol, but that involved an active airborne compound, not an essentially inert element. Similarly, the harms of smoking were physiologically and statistically apparent. The same can be said of the difference between wearing and not wearing seatbelts: so none of these is a valid precedent or equivalent to a lead ban.
The ban has 3 drivers:
1 - anti-shooters, who want to score a propaganda victory and price poorer people (the majority, as they are well aware, since this is an almost universal truth) out of shooting
2 - supermarkets, who think their customers will object to finding lead shot in their poultry: a crucial obstacle for driven shoots who need entry points into the human food chain to maintain any degree of broad social acceptability.
3 - ornithologists, who are concerned that some species with gizzards may die from picking up lead along with grit or grains.
I would propose the following actions:
1. Push back and cast the anti-shooters as the enemy of the common countryman. Oblige them to quantify the harm.
2. Require commercial contracts between providers and sellers of game prohibiting the use of lead shot to enable the buyer to terminate the contract if lead is found. Commercial shoots dealing with picky sellers can then require shooters to shoot non-lead, and have an incentive to check. You might take this further, but always keeping in mind that non-lead is about supermarkets' marketing, not protecting consumers.
3. Require the ornithologist to collect species, locations and population data, and on that basis apply for localised prohibitions - no data, no prohibition.
The bottom line to this is that we should be asking the demonisers of lead projectiles to prove there is a problem, demonstrate its scale, and propose proportionate action to mitigate the harms.
And by the way, there is no safe level of... peanuts - you may think this is a joke, but it isn't: like lead, they directly cause a measurable and substantial number of people to die and be hospitalised by contact with them every year. Yet we haven't introduced a universal peanut ban. Perhaps that will give the anti-lead brigade something to do next...
