Efforts to ban lead ammunition: a comparison between Europe and the United States

Abstract

The human health impacts of lead have been known for millennia but the environmental impacts of lead ammunition have only received attention during the past 100 years. To a large extent the United States provided leadership in identifying and researching these effects and then spearheading campaigns to transition away from lead shotgun ammunition for waterfowl hunting. However, the appetite for further federal transition has largely stalled in the U.S. except for apparently limited action linked to individual states, charismatic species, and specific sites. Europe, on the other hand, though generally rather late to the table with regard to lead shotgun ammunition and waterfowl hunting, is now pushing ahead with several initiatives that are likely to see substantial partial, if not total, restrictions on the use of all lead ammunition (for shotguns and rifles) within 5 to 10 years. We discuss the policy drivers behind these moves, summarize the key attitudes and perceived constraints to transition, and provide (cautious) timetables and limited recommendations for future changes.

Outcomes from monitoring the fourth year of a five-year voluntary transition from hunting with lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition in Britain

“…The best estimate of the percentage of pheasants expected to be killed using lead shot in the last season of the transition period (2024/2025), as projected from the fitted regression model, is that it will be about 84%. It has been argued that, because we do not find shot in all pheasant carcasses dissected, the SHOT-SWITCH measure of the proportion of carcasses in which any shot is found that contain lead might overestimate the proportion of pheasants killed with lead pellets (Green et al 2023b;Ellis & Miller 2023). This would be true if non-lead shot were more likely than lead to pass through the bird's body without embedding in it.…”

“…The 95% bootstrap confidence interval for this percentage (71% to 135%) indicates that it is unlikely that there is a difference in the proportions of birds from which shot were recovered between those killed using lead and non-lead shot large enough to bias our estimates substantially in either direction. We therefore do not consider that the measure proposed by Ellis & Miller (2023) is an accurate alternative to the one we have used. However, we note that, even if it is adopted, analysis of the results shown in Table 1 indicates no evidence for a downward trend over time in the proportion of pheasants killed using lead shotgun ammunition in response to the voluntary transition.…”

“…ISSN 1758-2067 decline was small and insufficient to meet the target reduction: the expected value from the regression for the 2024/2025 season, the last of the transition period, is 84% of carcasses with lead shot. Ellis & Miller (2023) suggested an alternative measure of the proportion of pheasants killed using lead shotgun ammunition in which the number of carcasses from which lead pellets were recovered is divided by the total number of carcasses dissected. This might be more appropriate than our measure if the proportion of pheasants shot using non-lead ammunition from which at least one pellet was recovered was much lower than the equivalent proportion for birds killed using lead shot.…”

“…To check this proposal, we calculated the average number of lead and non-lead shot/carcass for carcasses from which at least one shot was recovered. If the method proposed by Ellis & Miller (2023) is valid, we would expect that the average number of shotgun pellets recovered for carcasses found to contain at least one non-lead pellet would be considerably lower than the equivalent mean for carcasses with lead shot. We pooled data on the numbers of recovered shot/carcass across all four SHOT-SWITCH seasons because of the small sample size for non-lead shot in any individual season.…”