Hunting is being attacked as part of a campaign to ban the use of traditional ammunition – comprised of lead core components. Across the country anti-lead ammunition and anti-hunting groups have lobbied wildlife commissions, state legislatures, and state and federal agencies to ban the use of traditional ammunition, claiming that scavenging animals consume lead pellets from the carcasses or gutpiles of game shot by hunters.

In 2007, proponents of one of the nation’s first lead bans, California Assembly Bill (AB) 821, claimed that California condors were being poisoned by lead ammunition. They promised that if hunters stopped using lead ammunition, the poisoning would stop.

There is substantial evidence, however, that the groups behind the attack on the use of lead ammunition have based their claims on faulty science, and have used questionable scientific methods, selectively cherry picking data and routinely ignoring alternative sources of lead in the environment.

Since the passage of AB 821 in California, a comparison of pre-ban and post-ban blood lead data in designated condor ranges indicates that, contrary to activists’ claims, the incidence of lead exposure and toxicity in condors actually increased slightly, compounding the problem and leaving multiple condors dead. The failure of California’s lead ammunition ban AB 821 to decrease lead poisoning in hunting areas, proves conclusively, that alternative sources of lead poisoning cannot be ignored.

Since 2003, Hunt for Truth has raised serious questions about the purported nexus between traditional ammunition and lead poisoning and/or mortality in California condors and other wildlife. Misunderstanding the truth behind the debate regarding the use of traditional lead ammunition, activists endanger public interests, threaten hunters’ rights, stifle valid conservationist goals, and, ironically, threaten the fragile California condor population with the very methods that they profess are used to save them.

Wildlife and natural resource conservation groups continue to review various regulatory threats to traditional hunting and shooting sports. Where the science unquestionably supports wise conservation management decisions, we support wildlife managers in their efforts to conserve our natural wildlife resources. But when the anti-lead ammunition movement offers politically biased, distorted, unsupportable and/or faulty science to impose regulations that do not implement sound wildlife conservation, we will continue to work tirelessly to expose their agenda and disseminate the truth.

Learn More about the Threats to Traditional Lead Ammunition: