[Jeff Higgins]

Any animals dying from ingesting lead found in dead carcasses would have to be consistently consuming lead tainted carcasses over a period of time. Big game lost after being shot is simply not common enough to support the numbers required for this to happen. Very few game animals are lost these days. Even if they are, they might have one or two bullets in them, assuming those bullets failed to fully penetrate in the first place. Most modern big game ammunition is capable of full penetration on virtually any shot taken on an average size deer, our most common big game animal. The woods and prairies would have to be literally littered with lost big game with bullets still in them for this to be an issue.

Lead shot is a bit more plausible as far as being suspect in this area. Far more hit birds are lost than big game, and certainly not all of the shot even hits a recovered bird. We wind up spraying an ounce and a half of lead out into the wilderness every time we pull the trigger. With the high concentration of hunters in specific areas, it does add up. But, like I mentioned earlier, lead shot has already been banned in the one area of its heaviest concentration - waterfowl hunting. No one has cleaned up the marshes, though... One is left to wonder how much of today's affect is a legacy of our past.

I kind of have to suspect these environmental groups are taking advantage of that legacy. They point to continuing problems (and rightly so) but are now attempting to place the blame on big game hunters (an absolute non-starter) and today's upland bird hunters who, for the most part, still use lead. I believe there is a great deal of crossover between "environmental" and "anti-hunting" groups, and they are using one cause (that they are intentionally misrepresenting) in an attempt to get some traction on another. Anyone even remotely familiar with big game hunting can see the absolute implausibility of that argument, and anyone familiar with upland bird hunting can see the very thin, very dubious, very remote possibility that there may be anything there.