I have spent the last couple hours reading instead of writing a response. Larry has been adamant in asking me to prove a negative, i.e., come up with one scientist who will say that the 1991 Federal lead shot ban was a scam. I have not found that whistle-blower as of yet... but if it will make Larry happy, I will keep looking. So far, as craigd has once again astutely noted, Larry has given us nothing of substance except to repeat his same tired refrain claiming that the 1991 ban was based upon sound, proven science, and is therefore a done deal that should not and shall not be questioned, lest we upset the establishment, and turn them even further against us. All we can do, is huddle in our little groups and demand good science.
I did find this very interesting 2014 article that said the "National Shooting Sports Foundation has obtained emails that it says indicate that a federal official withheld critical data on lead blood levels in the California condor until after gun control advocates in the California state legislature used the iconic bird’s plight to help push through a law last year to ban lead ammunition."
http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/nssf-back...ammo-ban-passedSome of the articles I've been reading are astoundingly ignorant. Like the information from the Univ. of Minn. Raptor Rehabilitation Center, it all sounds good until you take the time to pick out the glaring errors and inconsistencies that are routinely passed off as good science.
One so-called study from Biologicaldiversity.org makes the ludicrous claim that lead pellets often shatter into dust, particles, and residues while copper "leaves no dust and rarely fragments." You don't have to have a degree in metallurgy to instantly know that lead is more malleable and less prone to fragmenting than copper.
An emotional interview with a Condor Biologist from the Peregrine Fund in the Arizona Sun speaks about the dramatic comeback of the endangered California Condor from a low of 20 to more than 400 between California and Arizona in 2015. He only states that a major cause of Condor death is lead poisoning, but he gives no details about the source of that lead, or any results from ornithological pathologists to prove his single contention that the source of the poisoning is lead bullet fragments from gut piles. He claimed that Fish and Game biologists showed that a single bullet can leave up to 450 fragments.
Think about this. The population increased from 20 to 400 even though hunters and shooters were still using lead ammo. It was acknowledged that the first ban on lead ammunition in Condor range in California had zero effect on mortality. A Federal official withheld data on that until the statewide ban was passed. And now they are pressing for a lead ammo ban in Utah because some condors occasionally fly into Utah. The only real argument they have against lead ammunition is essentially the same as Larry's simplistic "Lead is Toxic. Toxic=Bad."
This so-called condor biologist went on to say that "Though they’re the biggest raptor in North America, they can be brought down by only 3 grains of lead." Just what is he saying here? 3 grains is less than one single # 4 lead shot pellet. What form of lead is this supposedly lethal 3 grains... solid, dust, suspended in a chemical, or a single #4 pellet in the head at a velocity of 1000 fps?
While on this subject of lethal doses of lead, I found some unbelievably wild extremes of lethal doses I mentioned earlier, from 5.6ppm cited by Larry to another study claiming that two bald eagles died with levels of between 26 and 38 ppm. My reading this afternoon has expanded those numbers dramatically from 48 ppm to this article from the Bangor Daily News:
http://bangordailynews.com/2014/11/13/outdoors/bald-eagle-found-in-howland-dies-of-lead-poisoning/ In it, there is an x-ray of an eagle's stomach that purports to show 4 fragments of bird shot found in a sick eagle. The 4 alleged pieces of shot are all clustered together... the pattern that hit the animal the eagle was feeding on must have been beyond tight. The alleged lead pellets are quite large in relation to other parts of this eagle's anatomy. And we are never shown actual shotgun pellets recovered in a subsequent autopsy. These objects could just as easily be steel or some other metal. Later in the article, it was stated that the blood lead levels of this eagle which died the day after it was brought into Avian Haven Bird Hospital, was off the scale of their sceening instruments" REALLY? They actually expect you to believe that nonsense after first telling you that this sick bird was found perched in a tree and that "It takes only a tiny, tiny amount to be a lethal dose.”
Think about that. This bird was claimed to have a blood lead level that was off the charts, too high to even read it, and way beyond lethal... yet it was strong enough to fly and perch on a tree limb where it was found. And think about this. People like Larry, Brent, and King are naive enough to swallow this crap and repeat it.
The frequent reference to lead in gut piles in many of these articles and many of Larry's posts has me shaking my head. I have hog-dressed over 50 deer in my life. Most were mine, and I don't pull the trigger unless my sights are on a vital area. I have never once put a bullet in the guts. I have gutted deer for a number of hunters who never did the job before, and only two were paunch shot. One was from a .44 magnum bullet that expanded very little and traversed from the front, through the lung and liver, and ended up in the stomach. The other was shot in the stomach with a .338 Win. Mag., and the bullet did not exit the stomach. Raptors are mostly meat eaters, so I doubt if they eat much, if any of the plant based stomach or intestinal contents of a deer. Yet these journal articles would have you believe that the vast majority of gut-piles are contaminated with lead... without offering a shred of proof. I know it happens. I just said so. But the numbers are undoubtedly much smaller than they attempt to portray.
Another study from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service studied the deaths of two loons. Because one had fishing line and fragments of lead sinkers and the other had only fragments of fishing line in the stomachs, they were "suspected" of dying from lead poisoning. Now there's some science you can hang your hat on.
Another article from 1981 in the New York Times that supported the banning of lead shot was documenting a large winter kill of thousands of geese in central Wisconsin that became concentrated in a small area which still had a little open water in winter.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/15/sports/outdoors-debate-stirs-over-lead-shot.htmlIt went on to claim that 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 waterfowl were dying from lead poisoning each year. It told of dredging of lake bottoms by biologists that picked up as many as 118,000 pellets an acre. That would be less than 3 pellets per square ft. in the most concentrated place they dredged, and included the top 4-6 inches of silt. One would assume that these pellets had been there all along and certainly more available to these geese before the lake became mostly frozen over. But one would have to use their brain to even think about that fact. The article didn't tell us the average number of shot per acre found in this dredging, only the worst extreme, or what it was in the small area of open water available to the geese. Nor did they tell you the depth of that open water area. Geese are mostly dabblers while feeding on water, not divers... thus they dunk their heads under water while their tails remain above the surface. They strain suspended aquatic vegetation and invertebrates. They are NOT known to root around in 4-6 inches of silt looking for lead shot that was likely there for many decades... especially if that lake bottom is deeper than they can reach without diving under the surface.
We are not told the percentage of dead gees from this mass winter kill that actually had lethal levels of lead. I still cannot even find agreement in what that lethal dose number is in the literature. Even if they actually autopsied and tested every one for lead, we are not shown peer-reviewed proof that lead poisoning was the cause of mortality. Many could just as easily have died from hypothermia due to cold and poor condition from a lack of nutrition.
This occurred to me last night when I was watching a show on CNN about the Jonestown Guyana mass suicide. They kept showing pictures of over 900 dead people who had drank cyanide laced Kool-Aid. If someone from a State Fish and Game agency told Larry, Brent, or King that those people died from eating lead shot, they would swallow it hook, line, and non-lead sinker.
This long post is just a brief synopsis and a small fraction of the large amount of easily refuted and highly questionable garbage that is being passed off as science and unbiased information. I could go on forever, but some people are hell-bent on ignoring the elephant in the room.
I have never doubted that there are some waterfowl or raptors that die from lead poisoning. I believe that problem was, and continues to be highly over-stated, and especially when lead ammunition is blamed to the exclusion of much more bio-available sources. The more I examine this, the more convinced I am.
Too bad that Buzz is so hell-bent on demonizing me that he cannot be fair and balanced enough to point out Larry's inflammatory statements or King Brown's outright lies. Buzz did the exact same thing yesterday when I responded to Brian Dudley's ad hominem attack in a now deleted thread. Buzz has done this several times in the past. What a hypocritical jerk. Yes Jay, I thought that out very carefully before I said it.
