Oh Deer

Posted by Jerry on Nov. 18, 2008

North Dakota saves lives by throwing out venison shot with high velocity ammunition and requiring that all deer donated to food banks in future be shot with arrows! The CDC is investigating whether game shot with high velocity bullets is safe to eat! Thank goodness the government is there to protect us from the perils of lead shot otherwise we’d apparently become stupider by the day.

  • That's the stupidest article I've read...well at least in the last week or so. "non-lead bullets." Wow.
  • I don't know ammo to save my life, but the fantastic Field & Stream (I'm a subscriber) covered the issue of lead bullets in food recently. There's apparently something to the whole non-lead bullets thing.
  • Jennifer
    Baylen,

    Meh. Perhaps it's because I grew up on the wilds of New Jersey where a soupcon of lead made a nice change from all the other toxins, but color me unimpressed by the article to which you linked.

    My beef (venison?) is not with the fragmentary nature of bullets but with the toxicology of lead (which incidentally was barely mentioned in any of these articles. I find this curious.). I understand that there is apparently no "safe level" of lead in children. (Thanks, ASDR! http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs13.html) and that the weans absorb lead more efficiently than adults, but I will still wager there are greater threats to children's health and even greater threats from sources of lead other than fragmented bullets.

    I have the greatest respect for the power of heavy metals, but what I take from this article is that despite all the recent chatter on the news about how food banks are running out of food and people are going hungry, hunger is not a serious issue in the US. If it were, food banks wouldn't be throwing out food.
  • Well, they might if the gov't forced them to do so. I can picture PETA, for example, lobbying against lead in food for the express purpose of banning donations of hunted meat.

    Again, I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to hunting. But I think I'd generally be happier to eat food that didn't contain lead than that did.
  • Though there are greater threats to children's health and even greater threats from sources of lead other than fragmented bullets, I still wouldn't want to have lead in my food. Purveyors of dangerous food ought to warn their clients what they are eating, because it does pose a grave threat to all carnivores.
  • Thanks for informing this to everyone. I really don't want to eat food with lead, cause I don't want to have a lead poisoning. Hopefully, this will be prevented as soon as possible.
  • Very funny
  • Great move by the government in pursuing such laws. Hope that other nations that use such bullets would follow too.
  • Arrows on the other hand, could make for a more agonizing demise for the animal if it doesn't hit fatally. So the middle solution to this is the use of non-lead bullets.
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