I watched a show on TV a couple of nights ago about eagles picking up lead. Sometimes they get it from shot in dead carcasses. They pick it up and ingest bullet fragments, spent lead shot and in fishing equipment like lead sinkers. Lead poisoning is the worst threat to eagles. Hunters gut animals like deer and leave the dead animal thinking it will feed the wild animals. But then animals come along and end up eating the lead. Or feed it to their young. Scientists can also measure the amount of lead in bird feathers and figure how long a bird was exposed to lead. It was an interesting show. One of the clubs I shoot at retrieves their shot every year. That is a good thing.
Um, no Dimmy W.
Actually, hunters gut their game animals and leave the gut piles in the woods. They generally take the entire carcass, minus the guts, home to process, freeze, and eventually eat. If you ever actually got out and did any amount of hunting, you might then use common sense, and learn not to believe every bit of environmental propaganda you are fed. If you ever did any fishing, you would know fish do not eat lead sinkers, so it is extremely unlikely that sinkers will end up inside of any fish consumed by eagles.
Since most hunters do their best to put their bullets into vital areas, and avoid gut shots, the entrails seldom contain any lead bullet fragments. In all of the deer I've shot in my life, not one bullet has gone behind the liver. The vast majority were heart/lung shots. When the carcass is processed, hunters and butchers also take care to trim away the shot-up meat around the wound channel. Oftentimes, much of the bullet passes through an exit wound, and ends up out in the woods where no animal is ever going to eat it. The waste trimmings containing most bullet fragments is then discarded in the trash. It is not taken back into the woods for poor eagles to eat or feed to their young.
In addition, while it is true that scientists can measure lead levels in blood, bones, feathers, etc., it is very difficult in most cases to determine the exact source of that lead. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction for anti-hunters and anti-gunners (mostly Democrats) is to blame lead ammunition. But there are many sources of lead in the environment, and a number of them are more bio-available and prone to be sources of lead poisoning than some extremely widely scattered shot or bullet fragments. Lead is one of the most recycled metals we use, so when they try to tell you they KNOW lead ammunition was the source because they did lead isotope analysis, then you can be pretty certain they are just making shit up. The lead in your shot or bullets could very well have once been used to make battery plates, toy soldiers, flashing, solder, lead pipes, X-ray shielding, etc. I recently bought two milk crates full of used lead came, that was salvaged from old stained glass windows. Lead isotope analysis is only useful for determining the mining source for virgin lead.
