Waitrose, Britain’s largest retailer of game, is to ban the sale of birds shot with lead, as experts call on the government to ban its use.
The move has been welcomed by the government’s independent expert group, which concluded that there was no way to reduce the risk to human health and wildlife from lead shot other than by using alternative, non-toxic ammunition instead.
After five years’ research, the Lead Ammunition Group concluded in 2015 that 10,000 children were growing up in households where they were regularly eating sufficient game shot with lead ammunition to cause them “neurodevelopmental harm and other health impairments”. It also cited studies estimating that 50,000-100,000 wildfowl were killed in Britain each year because they had accidentally ingested spent gunshot, mistaking it for food.
Lead bullets and shot fragment on impact with an animal, leaving tiny lead particles dispersed throughout the flesh. Predatory and scavenging birds, as well as people, consume lead fragments in the meat.
In a letter to the Guardian, a number of scientists and experts, including the former government adviser Prof Lord John Krebs and the Oxford academic Prof Christopher Perrins, have called on the government to take action on lead shot.
Despite successive environment secretaries ignoring advice from the Lead Ammunition Group, an increasing number of commercial companies, organisations and states are banning lead shot. It is outlawed in the Netherlands and Denmark, where shooters use non-toxic steel and bismuth shot instead. This month, California banned lead ammunition for all hunting.
Forest Enterprise England, which sells wild deer, has been using non-lead bullets since 2016. During this winter’s shooting season, Waitrose will begin phasing out the use of lead shot on the estates from which it sources game. By the 2020-21 shooting season, all Waitrose’s game will be “brought to bag” without the use of lead ammunition.
John Gregson, Waitrose’s senior manager of agri-food communications, said: “We expect high standards from our game suppliers and have been really pleased with their support.”
John Swift, a former chief executive of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) who chairs the Lead Ammunition Group, welcomed Waitrose’s move, but said the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs must take action to phase out lead shot.
“Waitrose deserve huge congratulations and they are showing real leadership and we need more of it,” he said. “The only way we can get rid of all these risks is to replace lead ammunition. Defra has got to pull its finger out and get the stakeholders around the table discussing the way forward.”
According to Swift, tradition and a fear that banning lead shot is an attack on the shooting industry is stopping Britain’s shooting groups from backing a transition to non-toxic shot. He said the number of different shooting organisations had not helped, with rival bodies worried they would be caught “on the wrong side of the argument”.
He said: “There is an attitude nowadays that anything that potentially restricts countryside sports is an attack on countryside sports, so the wagons circle and the attack has to be repelled. That prevents them from engaging constructively with a process of change, which strikes me as eminently doable.”
The EU is considering a Europe-wide ban on lead ammunition for shooting game such as wildfowl on wetlands. Lead shot is banned on all wetlands in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England and Wales, there is a ban on using lead shot to shoot wildfowl and for shooting on foreshores and on sites of special scientific interest, but research in England has found that more than 70% of ducks were shot with lead.
Debbie Pain, an independent ecological toxicologist and honorary research fellow at Cambridge University who has studied the effects of lead shot for nearly 40 years, also welcomed Waitrose’s move. “It’s a game-changer. Having a supermarket of game that is lead-free is a really positive move in the right direction, which is fantastic.
“It’s never been anti-shooting, it’s always been anti-poisoning. Shooting needs to be as sustainable as it can be. Killing large numbers of birds through poisoning is not a good idea, particularly when it puts people who frequently eat lead shot game at risk – and those people are mostly from the hunting community.
“You talk to young shooters in Denmark now and they’ve never used lead shot in their whole lives and they can’t understand why anyone would shoot a poisonous substance into an animal and then eat it.”
Caroline Bedell, executive director of conservation for BASC, which has consistently defended the use of lead shot, said: “As a market leader, we welcome Waitrose’s decision to stock and boost their wild game meat range. Any increase in the availability of game in the public market is good news for the rural sector. Game is a healthy source of protein, is growing in popularity, and we recognise Waitrose’s decision.”
A number of global scientific studies have identified associations between increased levels of lead in the blood and a reduced IQ in children. The European Food Safety Authority concluded that lead exposure from all sources should be reduced. The UK’s Food Standards Agency advises that consumers should reduce game consumption to minimise the risks.
