Leading the way for change

Shooting Campaign Manager, Roger Seddon, explores the transition to lead-free shot, and the impending hard deadline facing lead in this article for My Countryside magazine.

Lead kills, and not in a good way. Steel kills too, but in a most useful way. This is the message that one can seldom open a field sports magazine without reading, largely because both aspects of the message have met and are continuing to meet resistance from the people who need it most. So, what has happened when it comes to the voluntary transition from lead shot over the last five years and what’s in store for the next five? 

It was in February 2020, just as you-know-what was still in localised outbreak stage, that the Countryside Alliance, along with other shooting and countryside organisations first called for a five-year voluntary transition away from the use of lead shot in game shooting. This move prompted raised eyebrows among some, welcome nods from others and burst blood vessels in the remainder. This call was made for very good reasons: the organisations saw that shooting needed to get with the times if it were going to continue in recognisable form with long-term sustainability. Times and attitudes were changing and the bad PR of lobbing tonnes and tonnes of toxic lead shot into the environment and food chain, just wasn’t worth it. Our role as the charity representing the voice of the countryside is to sustain rural communities, promote environmental stewardship and challenge bias and misinformation, leading a transition away from lead ticks all those boxes.

Progress so far 

We are now approaching the fifth anniversary of the announcement of that voluntary transition and the world we find ourselves in is rather different. There is now a good variety of lead-free alternative game loads with bio-degradable wads available readily up and down the country – this is a result of the cartridge manufacturers being nudged into proactivity by our announcement in 2020. Many shoots who recognise and accept the importance of leaving lead behind no longer allow lead cartridges on their shoot days, and do not rue doing so. In those respects, the voluntary transition is going rather well. 

However, it wouldn’t take Nostradamus to predict that the game shooting world is not going to have fully transitioned away from lead shot, as we originally called for, by the end of the current shooting season. World events, business practicalities and a certain amount of obstinacy have hindered progress. The pandemic along with various wars and disrupted global supply chains have meant that cartridge manufacturers have found it challenging to source the requisite materials in such quantity to fully cater to the game shooting community. However, perhaps the bigger obstacle has been an epidemic of heel dragging within parts of the shooting community. 

Shooting in Britain is an inherently traditionalist thing, despite it having morphed in many ways over the last two hundred years. Regency rake John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton particularly enjoyed a spot of heron shooting and although we’ve since left that practice behind, some of us still use guns and garb designed and/or built in the 19th century. A symptom of this amnesiac traditionalism is the conviction that any sort of unrecognised change to shooting is anathema. But shooting must change to survive. 

Changing minds 

Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” Although some of his writings can make for challenging reading, this line is fairly straightforward: if a mind cannot change, it isn’t a mind. Championing the case for this sort of presence of mind is none other than the Countryside Alliance’s Director of Shooting, Adrian Blackmore, who was putting 30g #4 steel loads through his pair of side by sides on a recent partridge day, and doing so with great effect, notwithstanding the impressive height of the birds. 

The estate at which he was shooting has gone totally lead free. They did so to ensure a ready market for all the birds their guns couldn’t take home with them. Many non-shooting consumers won’t accept meat potentially containing lead, and if we don’t provide that even when we could, then perhaps game shots should be peering into a looking glass and pondering ‘why not?’ 

The Health and Safety Executive is expected to announce its final recommendations to the government by the end of November 2024. If they align with their most recent stance, the sale and use of lead shot in ammunition for game shooting is to be banned after a five-year transition period from enactment. That five years is a hard deadline, but it’s not one that those who haven’t yet stopped using lead have to stick to. Instead, they can stop using lead right away. If they’d like to demonstrate to policymakers and the general public that game shooters can shoulder responsibility, that they care about the countryside, its wildlife and its communities, then the next time they stock up on cartridges, they should pick up a few different boxes of non-lead cartridges, work out which ones work best in their gun, then commit. Steel shot kills pheasants, don’t let lead shot kill shooting.