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Hanging around with us can’t be helping….


Best,
Ted

When hunters want ammunition providing deep and effective penetration into the meat of game animals, they logically choose larger shot sizes and bigger heavier bullets. They have chosen lead for centuries because it is relatively inexpensive, and has the density to provide deep penetration and retention of energy. In addition, biting into a small piece of bullet or shot is far less likely to cause a fractured tooth than some of the much harder alternatives like steel or tungsten.

So now you have anti-lead ammo propaganda making the absurd claim that tiny fragments of lead, particles smaller in diameter than a human hair or dust, somehow defies physics and has the ability to penetrate far beyond the wound channel in meat or ballistics gelatin. If you believe this nonsense, maybe you should be loading your shells with lead dust instead of shot or bullets.

A number of guys here actually swallow this bullshit. Of course, any exposure to lead from any source will naturally increase the risk that some minute quantity may enter your system. But "risk" and an actual quantifiable number of hunters being diagnosed and treated for elevated blood lead levels are two dramatically different things. We are all exposed to nanometer sized lead particles across the United States on a daily basis because aviation gas still contains lead. This situation was much worse before the EPA phased out leaded gas for vehicles beginning in the 1970's.


Clapper Zapper is correct, there is not any epidemic of lead poisoning among hunters. In fact, it is actually quite rare, and nearly always due to non-ammunition sources of lead, such as old paint, plumbing, pesticides, batteries, industrial processes, etc.

I can also vouch for what LGF is so concerned about. If I had his apparent I.Q. level, I couldn't afford to lose any points either.

For duck breasts, I use a Kuman KW30 that I got on Amazon. Works fine for steels pellets, have not tried it on lead.

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.

Thanks.

Yes, lead itself is the issue. From a popular detector site: “Lead has low conductivity, which makes it challenging for some detectors to find, especially in small amounts.” As in looking for one #8 shot and especially when you’re looking for it with a hand held “pin pointer.”

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.

The TV show I watched, also showed where the lead comes from that eagles pick up a lot of the time. They said they find fishing sinkers, leaders and line along with bullets under the eagle's nest on the ground. They said they even find line with hooks and sinkers hanging from the nests. I don't recall them saying about finding any toy trucks or soldiers in the nest, though. Anyone who fishes knows that a fish can break the line and the hook can stay in its mouth along with the leader and sinkers. So an eagle will come along and pick up the fish and carry it back to its nest. That is how they end up eating the lead sinkers and the babies do too. Saying that fish don't eat sinkers so Eagles won't pick sinkers up with fish is quite silly. Also, a well-placed shot into a deer through the heart or lungs can still result in the deer still running several hundred yards, from what they said on the show. So the deer can get lost when the hunter cannot find it and after the animal dies, the animals will eat the deer and birds will carry off some of the remains including the lead bullet that is in the deer. And a deer, after a badly placed shot, can live for days and be lost, far away from where it was shot, from what they said. Also, a bullet can strike a large bone and fragmentize, so a hunter might not always find the entire bullet. And pieces of a bullet can remain inside the part of the deer when the hunter leaves the remains behind. They said, many times, animals only get wounded, crawl off and die with the lead intact after several days, so they don't always get gutted, in which case the lead remains in the animals and can be found in the eagle's feces. The same thing can happen with smaller animals like squirrels, rabbits or birds,etc.. They can be shot and run or fly off and an eagle will find it dead and take it back to its nest. They said that is how they end up eating the lead shot. Hmmm....How many times have we heard people on here saying they missed a shot at an an animal and it flying or running off? They said that since eagles main food supply is fish and animal meat, it isn't all that hard to see where it comes from. They can also x-ray an eagle and find bullet fragments. Most of the time it is not that hard to figure out what a bullet fragment is. Also, they said the size of the animal eating the shot is significant also. Whereas a couple pieces of shot in a human, won't be as bad as in a smaller animal like an eagle or a baby eagle...... I didn't think it was all that important to go into all this detail when I told the story, originally. Anyone can pretty much read about it if they GOOGLE the subject- if they take the time. I don't see anywhere that I said I believed EVERYTHING they said. I believe I said I watched the show and it was interesting. I always like to consider both sides of a story. And I am sure that when "SOME" people have been hunting, fishing and shooting as long as I have, which is most of my life and around the world, "THEY" will learn more and be more educated on the subject. But as always, some things get mistakenly misspoken...................... Here is a picture I had someone take as a joke of the "Whopper" I caught off of the pier, south of St. Petersburg a few years ago. As you can see, when I pulled this in, it had several yards of fishing line which I removed,- the hook is still in it's mouth along with several large sinkers (about the size of my finger) that are in my hand. You can imagine what would have happened if a diving bird, like one of the pelicans that are constantly overhead, would have dove into the water and picked up this entire mass and easily eaten it. So, fish don't have to eat sinkers for a bird to pick it up and eat it. Nuff said.................One thing I do know is- it's in the mid 60s this week here in the mid-west--the first week of January. So, I'll be out shooting. Whoo-Hoo!! :

We should be more concerned with those who use their little emotional anecdotes to intentionally misspeak. There are worse threats tolaw enforcement agents in the land oftampon tim, than to Bald Eagles and Florida Pelicans. A simple search will show that both birds have vigorously growing numbers.

Lead is the favorite subject of anyone who is attempting to subvert the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution. As I've mentioned before here, I worked in the environmental remediation industry for most of my 40-year career. We dealt with almost all of the industrial chemicals you could think of, from industrial solvents, chrome plating, & big fuel spills to mine wastes and former millitary sites (which included Rad, UXOs & high-nitrate problems). I've always referred to these sites (Superfund and otherwise) as "unfortunate real-estate". Any place with an active industrial or millitary past is likely to have some of these issues, and that includes just about anyplace that has ever been "civilized" and/or subjected to human habitation for any sustained period of time.

In the pantheon of toxic, reactive and corrosive chemicals, lead is simply a "lightweight" in comparison and yet it was always the most politically charged material we had to deal with. In the last year of my career I worked at the USEPA headquarters here in Denver and I can promise you this, if things had been allowed to continue under Democratic leadership, lead would have been the primary weapon used to further impair all of your 2nd Amendment rights.

That process was well-underway before the last election changed everything.

I share the same healthy skepticism as Lloyd concerning the grossly exaggerated efforts to treat lead as something more toxic and dangerous than plutonium.

This is especially because most of the anti-lead propaganda is coming from anti-gun Democrats and anti-hunting/ anti-fishing PETA type environmentalists. Easily influenced people like brain-damaged DimmyW will never stop for a second to catch their breath and realize that lead has been a part of our environment forever, and has been utilized by man for a very large number of things without causing any catastrophic extinction level events. But I'm waiting for them to report dinosaur bones with elevated lead levels.

That is not to say that lead is not a toxic substance. When used and disposed of improperly, it can cause plumbism (lead poisoning) in both humans and animals. However, lead shot and bullets have been used on a massive scale for several centuries. This means that all of the lead shot that was ever fired over lakes, rivers, estuaries, and wetlands prior to the U.S. lead shot ban is still there. Nobody cleaned it up... period. In fact, many Western Hemisphere countries still allow lead shot for migratory bird hunting, so ducks exposed to lead in Central and South America still migrate to the U.S. and Canada. Lead shot and bullets have been used to take game animals for just as long, and hunters have always lost a certain percentage of game to wounding or neglecting to track down the wounded animal. Yet nobody was getting into a panic or claiming to find eagle nests full of lead sinkers and bullet fragments until recently. And these alarmist documentaries and Panic Papers never mention that eagle and raptor populations are actually increasing... despite getting whacked by windmills and living in nests filled with toxic lead objects.

I have no doubt some fishing line has been utilized by eagles to construct their very large nests. That does not mean that the eagles will be stupid enough to eat any sinkers attached to that line, or to feed a tasteless chunk of lead to their offspring. Only "Sky-is-Falling" people like DimmyW swallow that bullshit. Also, a sinker or shot or bullet fragment found in an eagle's feces is a piece that passed through its' system far too quickly to have caused lead poisoning. And most animals tend to avoid consuming non-food contaminants in their food. The world is filled with pieces of metal of all types as a result of human activity. Isn't it odd that these Raptor researchers aren't reporting finding any other metal scrap or objects in eagle nests other than lead sinkers and bullet fragments??? But asking yourself questions like that involves understanding that there are many people with dishonest agendas. Kind of like the Democrat F.B.I. Agents who planted false evidence at Mara Largo.

Why aren't they also finding rusty nails, wood screws, pieces of steel, copper or aluminum wire? What about beer can pull tabs, keys, staples, or a thousand other metal objects that are not composed of that evil dastardly lead? Why aren't we seeing X-rays of eagles that have eaten these items, or became sick as a result? Why???... because it does not fit the agenda of convincing sponge-brained people like DimmyW that lead ammo and fishing equipment needs to be banned. DimmyW makes the lame excuse that he does not believe everything in his anti-lead show, yet he continues to report the bad, and expresses zero skepticism about the anti-lead claims. But a few more edits, and he'll get something right.

Meanwhile, here in the Midwest, cold temperatures and snow will return in a few days. My big snowblower has gotten a good workout several times so far, and was another good investment. But we are having a brief thaw after 9 days below freezing, before more snowfall happens... just like it has most years since long before DimmyW was born. People like DimmyW with brain damage and defective memories recall a childhood where snow started in late October and never stopped until March or April. Every day was a snow school cancellation day, and there were never any Winter days of cold rain, slush, and mud. As children, their snow men never melted until May. They are too mentally challenged to take a peek at the NOAA Historical Data for their area to see that the overall average temperatures have increased less than a degree in their entire lifetime, and the sky is not falling either. I remain happy that I spent a few extra bucks to put studded snow tires on my daughter's car and my vehicles, because it is the cheapest insurance you can buy. My Nokian studded tires were made at their plant in Dayton, Tennessee, right here in the U.S.A. So no tariffs are involved.

Best of all, DimmyW will respond specifically to my post because he says he uses the IGNORE USER function to IGNORE my Posts. Seriously. As a result, I am locked in this amusing battle of wits with an unarmed man. In that photo above, which has the highest I.Q., (A) the little fish... (B) the lead sinker... or (C) DimmyW?

Hint: It sure ain't (C)