Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Effectiveness of actions intended to achieve a voluntary transition from the use of lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition for hunting in Britain

Green, Rhys E.; Taggart, Mark A.; Pain, Deborah J.; Clark, Nigel A.; Clewley, Louise; Cromie, Ruth; Dodd, Stephanie G.; Elliot, Bob; Green, Ros M.W.; Huntley, Brian; Huntley, Jacqui; Pap, Sabolc; Porter, Richard; Robinson, James A.; Sheldon, Rob; Smith, Ken W.; Smith, Linda; Spencer, Jonathan; Stroud, David

Effectiveness of actions intended to achieve a voluntary transition from the use of lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition for hunting in Britain Thumbnail


Authors

Rhys E. Green

Mark A. Taggart

Deborah J. Pain

Nigel A. Clark

Louise Clewley

Ruth Cromie

Stephanie G. Dodd

Bob Elliot

Ros M.W. Green

Brian Huntley

Jacqui Huntley

Sabolc Pap

Richard Porter

James A. Robinson

Rob Sheldon

Ken W. Smith

Linda Smith

Jonathan Spencer

David Stroud



Abstract

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.

Citation

Green, R. E., Taggart, M. A., Pain, D. J., Clark, N. A., Clewley, L., Cromie, R., …Stroud, D. (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, 19, 8-14. https://doi.org/10.52201/cej19/safd8835

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 23, 2022
Online Publication Date Feb 24, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Feb 24, 2022
Publicly Available Date Feb 24, 2022
Journal Conservation Evidence Journal
Publisher Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 19
Pages 8-14
DOI https://doi.org/10.52201/cej19/safd8835

Files

Published Journal Article (355 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
The Conservation Evidence Journal is an open access online journal devoted to publishing the evidence on the
effectiveness of management interventions. The other papers from The Conservation Evidence Journal are available
from www.conservationevidencejournal.com. The pdf is free to circulate or add to other websites and is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Under this
licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their articles.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations