Is this a thing?? Sounds nuts to me, but a member of this forum is claiming its dangerous. I have checked with google and couldn't find anything substantive to support the claim.
I lived through the steel versus lead debate and saw first hand what the results were.
With birds, lead had an effect because some of the birds actually eat the pellets/bullet fragments because they don't know the difference and get sick.
With ducks, they pick up the shot if they feed on the bottom and if it is hard they may pick up a few, but most of the time ducks they are in mud bottoms and the shot sink well below their reach in the mud. The big change came with increased losses in game birds, and more loses in animals. When we were forced to switch to steel shot, populations of both ducks and the scavengers went down.
In some areas, lead did effect the populations of scavengers but a lot of this problem stemmed from
Game not being recovered with more effort.
The difference with game animals shot with a rifle is a totally different scenario. because we don't normally eat the wound channel area because of the quality and the fact that it is blood shot. If you do a proper job of processing the game you will probably never ingest even a small piece of lead if any.
It's a case of one in a million events, becoming an every day problem created by those that don't want us to hunt or shoot and in realty, It becomes the leads fault and you must be protected from it just like the gun it's self.
Clean your game properly and don't worry about something that is non existent. Lead poisoning is real so care should be exorcised but eating any heavy metals can be bad for you
so don't eat bullets or the effected areas and live long.
J E CUSTOM
