Effectiveness of actions intended to achieve a voluntary transition from the use of lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition for hunting in Britain
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Authors
Green, RE
Taggart, MA
Pain, DJ
Clark, NA
Clewley, L
Cromie, R
Dodd, SG
Elliot, B
Green, RMW
Huntley, B
Huntley, J
Pap, S
Porter, R
Robinson, JA
Sheldon, R
Smith, KW
Smith, L
Spencer, J
Stroud, D
Publication Date
2022-01-01Journal Title
Conservation Evidence
ISSN
1758-2067
Publisher
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Green, R., Taggart, M., Pain, D., Clark, N., Clewley, L., Cromie, R., Dodd, S., et al. (2022). Effectiveness of actions intended to achieve a voluntary transition from the use of lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition for hunting in Britain. Conservation Evidence https://doi.org/10.52201/CEJ19/SAFD8835
Abstract
<jats:p>In 2020, nine major UK shooting and rural organisations proposed a voluntary transition from the use for hunting of lead shotgun ammunition to non-lead alternatives. The major food retailer Waitrose & Partners has announced its intention to move to not supplying game meat products from animals killed using any kind of lead ammunition and the National Game Dealers Association announced a plan for a similar policy to be implemented in 2022. The SHOT-SWITCH research project, which is intended to monitor the progress of these voluntary initiatives, began in the 2020/2021 shooting season. The project monitors changes in the proportions of wild-shot common pheasants Phasianus colchicus available to consumers in Great Britain that had been killed using lead and non-lead shotgun ammunition, as assessed by using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry to identify the composition of shotgun pellets recovered from carcasses. In 2020/2021, 99.4% of the pheasants sampled had been killed using lead ammunition. We report here further results from this study for the 2021/2022 season. We found that 99.5% of the 215 pheasants from which shotgun pellets were recovered had been killed using lead ammunition. We conclude that the shooting and rural organisations’ joint statement and two years of their considerable efforts in education, awareness-raising and promotion, have not yet had a detectable effect on the ammunition types used by hunters who supply pheasants to the British game meat market.</jats:p>
Sponsorship
We thank Leo Batten, Margot Brownsword, Jacquie Clark, Sophie Green, Shireen Green, Pat Harcup, Roderick Leslie, Jonathan More O’Ferrall, Rob Robinson, Alastair Stobart, Matthew Webster and Alastair M. Wilson for assistance with obtaining and processing the pheasant carcasses. We are grateful to Niels Kanstrup, Dan Reynolds and John Swift, who supplied us with shotgun pellets of known types to test our chemical analysis methods. Rob Sheldon thanks Wild Justice for funding support. Peter Marshall kindly provided detailed information on the efforts made by BASC to promote the transition to non-lead shotgun ammunition. We are grateful to Andrew Teanby for permission to cite the Savills Game and Conservation Benchmarking Survey. We thank Ann Thornton, Bill Sutherland and anonymous reviewers for useful comments. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Waitrose & Partners and Lincolnshire Game contributed to the costs of materials and reagents for the study.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.52201/CEJ19/SAFD8835
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/334565
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