What the Humane Society of the United States says the CDC says:
The Humane Society of the United States renewed a call for a nationwide ban on lead-shot ammunition after the North Dakota Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the results of a lead study last week. According to preliminary findings, North Dakotans who ate wildlife killed with lead bullets had higher levels of lead in their blood than people who ate little or no meat from wild animals.
“If there was any doubt about the urgent need to rid our country of lead ammunition, here is proof positive,” said Andrew Page, senior director of the Wildlife Abuse Campaign for The HSUS. “Extremist hunters have long contaminated watersheds and habitat, dooming animals to slow and painful deaths. Now that hunters know their actions are directly putting themselves and other people at risk, there are no more excuses to use the ammo that just keeps on killing.”
What the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually says:
While this study suggests that consumption of wild game meat can adversely affect PbB,
no participant had PbB higher than the CDC recommended threshold of 10µg/dl—the level at
which CDC recommends case management; and the geometric mean PbB among this study
population (1.17µg/dl) was lower than the overall population geometric mean PbB in the United
States (1.60 µg/dl) (CDC 2005). The clinical significance of low PbB in this sample population
and the small quantitative increase of 0.30µg/dl in PbB associated with wild game consumption
should be interpreted in the context of naturally occurring PbB.
By way of clarification, the National Shooting Sports Foundation provides this explanation:
The CDC report on human lead levels of hunters in North Dakota has confirmed what hunters throughout the world have known for hundreds of years, that traditional ammunition poses no health risk to people and that the call to ban lead ammunition was nothing more than a scare tactic being pushed by anti-hunting groups.
In looking at the study results, the average lead level of the hunters tested was lower than that of the average American. In other words, if you were to randomly pick someone on the street, chances are they would have a higher blood lead level than the hunters in this study.
…
For more than a century, hundreds of millions of Americans have safely consumed game harvested using traditional hunting ammunition, and despite there being no scientific evidence that consuming the game is endangering the health of individuals, special interest groups like the Peregrine Fund and anti-hunting groups are continuing to press state legislatures around the country to support a ban on this common, safe and effective ammunition.
These politically driven groups understand that while an outright ban on hunting would be nearly impossible to achieve, dismantling the culture of hunting one step at a time is a realistic goal. Banning lead ammunition is the first step of this larger political mission. We can only hope that with the conclusive CDC results concerning the safety of traditional ammunition, legislatures across the country will listen to science and not anti-hunting radicals.
The notion by some, that any amount of lead is a “concern,” is scientifically unfounded rhetoric that runs contrary to nationwide, long-standing standards of evaluation. The NSSF is pleased that hunters and others can now comfortably continue consuming game harvested with traditional ammunition that has been properly field dressed and butchered, yet we remain unsettled that for so many months good and safe food was taken out of the mouths of the hungry as nothing more than a political gambit by special interest groups.
And the big take-aways from the study are:
1. Consuming game harvested using traditional hunting ammunition does not pose a human health risk.
2. Participants in the study had readings lower than the national average and well below the level the CDC considers to be of concern.
3. Children in the study had readings that were less than half the national average and far below the level the CDC considers to be of concern.
4. The study showed a statistically insignificant difference between participants who ate game harvested using traditional hunting ammunition and the non-hunters in the control group.
5. Hunters should continue to donate venison to food pantries.
Andrew Page, you are a liar. The Humane Society of the United States is lying. And, make no mistake, attempting to ban lead ammunition over fallacious and scientifically dispoven concerns of “lead poisoning” is nothing more than an outright attack on the traditions of hunting and the Second Amendment. Hell, you know why this CDC study got launched? Because the hunters had the nerve to go and donate meat to local food pantries – and here the Humane Society of the United States is trying to damn that act of charity, while simultaneously assaulting human and American traditions.
Thankfully, I understand that local chapters of the Society are not directly tied to their United States equivalent, but I can provide no evidence of that online. If anyone else can, I would greatly appreciate it, given that pounds across America really do a lot of good… unlike their parent organization, it would seem.
More at Say Uncle, Call me Ahab, Snowflakes in Hell, and Days of our Trailers.
recent comments