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The Scientific Debate Is Settled: Dispersed Lead Ammunition Is a Menace to Wildlife and People
Millions of animals and millions of Americans — kids, pregnant women, and the needy — are at risk from an element known to be deadly, irreducible for 2,000 years
By Wayne Pacelle
Nobody should use bullets that keep killing long after being discharged from a firearm.
But that’s exactly what happens when hunters load lead rounds into their shotguns and rifles, take aim at their quarry, and scatter lead throughout the biotic community.
Think of 10 million hunters, fanning out across America’s forests and fields, striking or missing their target. Acting independently but with dangerous cumulative impact, they inject wild animals and pollute the wild with toxic bullets and fragments on more than a billion acres of public and private lands.
Yes, a billion. Half of the land area of the United States. No other past commercial user of lead had such a distribution force — six times larger than the standing army of the United States prior to 2010. Since that year, the Army’s "Green Ammo" program has significantly reduced lead contamination at training ranges and eliminated lead exposure for soldiers during manufacturing and firing. The Army has replaced its traditional lead-core M855 (the standard rifle round used by almost every soldier) with the M855A1 Enhanced Performance copper round.
Gut Pile Kills Wildlife, While Edible Portion Goes Home to Poison People
When a hunter dresses out a deer, elk, moose, or pronghorn, he takes the edible portion of the animal home for friends and family. If he’s used lead, the carcass will be riddled with toxic fragments, with more than 99% of the fragments too small to spot and remove from the carcass.
But that’s just the half of it.
At the kill site, he also leaves behind the skin, sinew, bones, blood, organs, hooves, and other parts of the animal’s body—a “gut pile” that is a smorgasbord for forest denizens. Eagles, hawks, owls, vultures, foxes, and other scavengers swoop in for a meal. There’s no waste in nature. The animals, in the circle of life, grab and go. Lead and all.
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X-rays show the problematic dispersion of fragments from a lead 30-caliber Winchester magnum lead core bullet with copper jacket (left) compared to the single remnant of a solid copper bullet of the same caliber.
The United States annually produces billions of rounds of ammunition, including rimfire and centerfire cartridges and shotgun shells. Hunters and target shooters annually discharge at least 50,000 tons of lead into our nation’s environment. This is equivalent to about 9 billion .22 caliber bullets or lead from approximately 180 million car batteries. It’s the largest source of lead in the environment, with a volunteer labor pool that spreads it just about everywhere.
The Eagle Has Landed—With a Thud
A study published in January 2022 in the journal Science [[link removed]] documented the mass poisoning of eagles who ingest lead ammo fragments, with population-level effects on these iconic raptors.
The eight-year study of 1,210 bald and golden eagles across 38 states—co-authored by dozens of wildlife scientists—determined that up to 47% of eagles had “bone lead concentrations above thresholds for chronic poisoning.” According to the study, a third of eagles had “acute [lead] poisoning.”
There may be more than 20 million wild animals of all species who die every year from lead poisoning, with the ground-feeding birds mistaking the lead fragments for seeds, and predators and scavengers consuming the remains. Known as plumbism, lead poisoning is painful, and even when lead exposure isn’t immediately lethal, it doesn’t take much to weaken an animal to the point that it succumbs to predation or disease.
The scientific and anecdotal evidence is as attention-getting as a 21-gun salute: Ingestion of lead bullet fragments has been the leading cause of death for the highly endangered California condor. And ingestion of lead bullet fragments is a leading reason hawks, eagles, vultures, and other animals are brought to wildlife rehabilitation centers. Symptoms include deadened eyes, drooping heads, and quivering bodies.
Lead Is Not Meant to Be Ingested by Any Living Creature
With an atomic number of 82, lead has had its poisonous characteristics on display for more than 2,000 years. Its intrusion into the body has the potential to diminish the function of every organ. But plumbism is best known for its effects on the brain and cognitive function.
According to one peer-reviewed study published in 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States. The study focused on people born before 1996—the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead.
“[Plumbism] can lead to a variety of neurological disorders, such as brain damage, mental retardation, behavioral problems, nerve damage, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia,” according to the National Institutes of Health. [[link removed]]
For these reasons, lead has been banned for use in toys, paint, gasoline, and other commercial products.
But state wildlife agencies — endlessly repeating the mantra that they engage in science-based wildlife management — continue to allow and excuse lead bullets in all states but one. In California, state lawmakers deflected arguments from the guns and ammunition lobby — without a single hunting group in favor — and passed a bill to ban lead ammo in 2013. The phase-in of non-toxic shot was completed in July 2019. The transition has been seamless. And there’s been no drop in hunting license sales attributed in any way to the need for hunters to convert to non-toxic ammunition. Hunters, their families, food bank participants, and wildlife are all safer because of it.
More than a generation ago, also over the objections of the National Rifle Association and other extreme hunting and gun-rights groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under pressure from legal challenges, banned the use of lead ammunition in waterfowl hunting in 1991. “Plumbism [lead poisoning] was first seen in ducks in 1874,” wrote conservation writer Ted Williams. “But it wasn’t until 1991 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got around to banning lead shot for waterfowl.” The ban is estimated to have saved as many as 1.4 million mallards a year, along with perhaps a million other migratory birds.
That shift in policy is one of the great animal welfare and conservation success stories in 20th-century American wildlife management.
Hunters and Their Families and Friends Exposed to a Toxic Element for No Good Reason
You would think that organized hunting groups, given that their supporters provide venison and other meats from wild animals they shoot to their kids, parents, friends, and food banks, would be the loudest voices calling on the policymakers to address the problem, demanding that ammunition-makers make non-toxic shot widely available at affordable prices, and alerting their rank-and-file to the risk of lead fragments and lead dust in the wild-game meat they consume. But no, they deflect and bellyache about hunters ditching the sport if they are asked to purchase widely available, affordable, and highly lethal non-toxic shot.
Let’s look at the details and scale of the problem:
* A single round can shatter into millions of small fragments up to 18 inches away from the bullet’s trajectory, especially when it strikes bone. One recent study shows that lead dust cannot even be picked up by a microscope or X-ray, never mind the human eye.
* High-velocity ballistic-tip lead bullets left an average of 141 fragments in a mean of 11 inches from the wound channel, according to one state fish and wildlife agency study.
* There are 12 million hunters in the U.S. Conservatively, if they share game meat with five family members and friends, that’s 60 million Americans exposed to lead levels exceeding CDC standards.
* Over 40 states operate game meat donation programs associated with food banks, facilitating the distribution of roughly 1 million kilograms (1,100 tons) of game meat annually (Buenz et al. 2024). Add millions of others to the lead exposure list.
The stubborn refusal of hunting industry leaders to protect their own people makes no sense. Poke around on the websites of the biggest ammo manufacturers, and even there you’ll find the firearms industry singing the praises of lead alternatives. “Looking for premium performance without the premium price?” asks one brand-name maker of steel shot. Others note that steel shot “delivers denser patterns for greater lethality and is zinc-plated to prevent corrosion.”
On the wildlife front, sport hunters often proudly cite the legacy of President Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps one of our nation’s best-known conservationists and hunters. But Roosevelt understood that “conservation” is a call to practical action to safeguard wildlife and the environment. Today’s lead-using hunters don’t get a pass by associating themselves with a conservation-minded hunter who died more than a century ago; it’s not conservation to kill eagles, hawks, owls, and all manner of other birds through their wide dispersal of lead into the environment.
Next week, I’ll appear with rank-and-file hunters, animal advocates, wildlife rehabilitators, veterinarians, and public-health scientists to ask Maryland lawmakers to start the process of making the Free State the second state in the nation to phase out lead ammunition. And we are launching petitions to state fish and wildlife commissions in six states to stop this mass poisoning of wildlife and people. Meanwhile, we are asking Congress to take just a minor step: pass legislation in Congress to stop the use of lead ammunition on our national wildlife refuges — the category of federal lands set aside specifically to protect wildlife. [[link removed]]

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It’s hard to believe that these policies at the state and federal levels even require debate, with 600 studies showing the toxic effects of lead ammunition on wildlife and humans, with new studies coming out every week. But such is our task — often to state the obvious, to overcome stubbornness and human habit, to demand better in our treatment of animals, and to ask the people in power to act without fear or favor.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy [[link removed]] & Animal Wellness Action, is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”
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