On the 24th of February 2020, nine UK game shooting and countryside organisations issued a joint statement expressing their wish to end, within five years, the use of lead and single-use plastics in shotgun ammunition used by hunters “in consideration of wildlife, the environment and to ensure a market for the healthiest game products”. The intention was that this would occur on an entirely ‘voluntary’ basis.
Our SHOT-SWITCH project aims to monitor this transition over the coming five years by testing wild-shot pheasants offered for sale across Britain and determining if they have been killed using toxic lead or non-lead shotgun ammunition.
The project began in the 2020/21 pheasant shooting season (which ran from Oct 2020 to Feb 2021). Each year, whole pheasants are purchased from retailers by a collaborative partner network widely distributed across Britain, with their location and date of purchase documented. Birds are then carefully dissected to remove any shotgun pellets, and these are then tested for bulk metallic composition at the ERI – testing for lead (Pb), tungsten (W), bismuth (Bi), iron (Fe) and copper (Cu). Pellets are also visually examined, recording their colour, malleability, and magnetism. At least 200 pheasants are being purchased each shooting season.
Each year, SHOT-SWITCH will publish its findings in a peer-reviewed journal, with our first four seasons of results now published in February 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 in the Conservation Evidence Journal (https://conservationevidencejournal.com/reference/pdf/8858), (https://conservationevidencejournal.com/reference/pdf/11620), (https://conservationevidencejournal.com/reference/pdf/11848) and (https://conservationevidencejournal.com/reference/pdf/12261). PDF of the papers are also available below.
Over time, we will describe any changes we see in toxic lead vs non-lead ammunition prevalence, relative to previous seasons. Hence, SHOT-SWITCH will cover the whole period of the voluntary phasing-out of the use of lead shotgun ammunition in Britain and provide a clear measure of its success – with particular relevance to consumers of game meat, human and wildlife health.
Because of the range of benefits brought by the use of non-lead ammunition to the environment, human health and to the protection of game markets in the UK and Europe, it is possible that regulation of lead gunshot ammunition will be introduced in the UK in advance of the proposed five-year voluntary phase-out period. Whether that happens or not, we plan to continue monitoring shot types used for pheasant shooting annually until the 2024/2025 shooting season.
Concerns were raised in March 2023 by Mr Ian Bell, the Chief Executive Officer of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), about the accuracy of the interpretation of data in the above SHOT-SWITCH publications. We responded to these concerns on this website on 19 April 2023, but we have since found additional relevant information (of which we were previously unaware). We have therefore updated our response in the document below. Our findings continue to indicate that Mr Bell’s concerns are not supported by any of the several types of evidence currently available on this topic.
We are grateful to Mr Bell for this opportunity to clarify the interpretation of SHOT-SWITCH evidence in detail and for agreeing that we could identify in our response the concerns he raised and their source.
A paper published in the journal PLoS ONE by members of the SHOT-SWITCH team found that pheasants sold for human consumption contained many fragments of toxic lead derived from the lead shotgun pellets used to kill them. The fragments were too small for consumers to detect and too distant from the shot to be removed without throwing away a large proportion of otherwise useable meat. The researchers used a high-resolution CT (computerised tomography) scanner to locate the lead fragments in the pheasant meat in three dimensions and measure their size and weight. The CT scans revealed up to 10mg of tiny lead shards per pheasant, and an average of 39 per bird. Most were very small – less than 0.3mm in diameter.
Link to full paper here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268089
A recently published study by SHOT-SWITCH investigators also compared lead concentrations in meat from wild-shot pheasants from which lead or iron shotgun pellets were recovered (having first removed all pellets from the meat before analysis). The mean concentration of lead in meat from pheasants killed using lead shot was >20 times the EU’s maximum permitted level for lead in meat from domesticated animals and 30 times that for meat from pheasants killed using iron shot.
For further information regarding this project, please contact: Professor Rhys E. Green (University of Cambridge: reg29@cam.ac.uk), Professor Deborah J. Pain (University of Cambridge: dp596@cam.ac.uk), or ERI’s Dr Mark A. Taggart (Mark.Taggart@uhi.ac.uk). Further project details can also be found in these PDF’s, first about the project itself, and second about the methods used by our collaborators to find, remove and record the shot they find in purchased pheasants each year.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Waitrose & Partners, and the Scottish Alliance of Geoscience, Environment and Society (SAGES) contribute to the costs of materials and reagents for the study.
SHOT-SWITCH also approached two of the leading science-based organisations that made the joint statement on the 24th of February 2020 (BASC and GWCT) in April-September 2020 when the project was being planned and invited their involvement in its design and funding. Similar approaches were made in August 2021, August 2022 and August 2023. BASC and GWCT have so far declined to participate in the project.