In February this year, a team of scientists from Cambridge University published a study that found that 94% of pheasants on sale in the UK for human consumption were killed using toxic lead (see here).
It was the third scientific paper published by the ‘Shot-Switch‘ group, which was established in 2020 to monitor the shooting industry’s professed voluntary five-year transition from toxic lead to non-lead ammunition in the UK; a massive U-turn by the shooting industry after defending the use of toxic lead ammunition for years.
The Shot-Switch team buys pheasants from retailers during each shooting season and undertakes rigorous scientific tests to determine whether they’ve been shot with toxic lead or non-lead ammunition.
This third paper, published in the highly-regarded Conservation Evidence journal, documenting that 94% of pheasants on sale during the 2022/23 season were contaminated with toxic lead, demonstrated that the shooting industry’s voluntary initiative to phase out toxic lead shot for pheasant hunting has so far had little impact.
This is fairly embarrassing for the game shooting industry, obviously, and, unsurprisingly, there was very little public response from them when the peer-reviewed paper was published in February.
Also unsurprisingly, at least one prominent shooting organisation has raised what it calls ‘significant concerns‘ about the accuracy of the most recent paper’s conclusions.
The Chief Executive of BASC (one of the nine shooting organisations that in 2020 committed to the 5-year voluntary transition away from toxic lead) wrote to the paper’s lead author, Professor Rhys Green, to raise those concerns in March 2023.
You can read what those concerns are, and how the expert scientists have responded, in this letter that’s just been published on the Shot-Switch website:
Astonishingly (or not!), BASC has responded today by publishing an outrageous slur on its website where it describes the Shot-Switch study as “pseudoscience“.
The BASC statement also fails to provide details of the Shot-Switch scientists’ responses to BASC’s concerns:
Of course the shooting organisations will want to undermine and discredit any research that demonstrates the industry’s intransigence and complete failure to self-regulate; it’s their stock response and they’ve been doing it for years (see their endless attempts to discredit scientific reports of ongoing raptor persecution, for example).
And it’s really no surprise that BASC is fronting this latest attack, given the revolt this organisation faced from its own members when it finally U-turned in 2020 and suggested a move away from toxic lead ammunition. I expect BASC’s latest response is to try and placate some of those members (and perhaps entice back some of its now ex-members).
But I’m really surprised at Dr O’Gorman’s accusation that the Shot-Switch project is “pseudoscience“. As someone with a PhD, he’ll know the appropriate process for challenging peer-reviewed scientific rigour is to submit a rebuttal to the journal that published the research, rather than pen a nasty, derogatory article on a website without providing the detailed responses of the expert scientists he’s accusing of false results.
Can we expect to see such a letter in the journal Conservation Evidence? No, thought not.
Fortunately, as the Shot-Switch scientists have had the decency to be transparent and publish their responses in full on their own website, people can read the evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
It’s worth noting the following statement at the foot of the Shot-Switch website:
‘The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Waitrose & Partners 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 and August 2022. BASC and GWCT have so far declined to participate in the project’.
UPDATE 16th August 2023: BASC ‘forgets’ to mention evidence showing no difference between penetration level of lead vs steel shot in ‘game meat’ (here)
Raptor Persecution UK 
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot ! BASC along with other shooting bodies has actually made a creditable effort to convert their members away from lead. Quite rightly they realise that only compulsion can follow if the voluntary approach fails. Obviously, despite a genuine effort they are so far failing and are right to be worried that with other issues like the HSE review compulsion looks increasingly inevitable. So why on earth come out with this frankly hilarious attack on a study which is so simple it’s barely science. And maybe a brief look at the list of authors might have convinced Dr O’Gorman that this was not a group to test BASC’s credibility against. For the sake of transparency I’m one of them.
Unfortunately having read the original report it would be nice if when falsifying photos of evidence they are least tried to make them look real.
A photo of one of their test birds with the lead shot they had removed next to it. Completely shiny and all in absolutely perfect and new condition.
Someone needs to teach them to drop the bought in shot on the floor and roll it around for a little bit before the photos
BASC have never cared about preserving wildlife, it’s all about killing it off to them. By any means.
Just goes to show that a PhD doesn’t necessarily make you clever or xxxxxxx
[Ed: That’s libellous, Simon]
Only if you name the person, not if you make a general statement, which is why I structured it that way.
[Ed: it doesn’t work like that. It’s reasonable that someone would infer your comment was about Dr O’Gorman, whether you intended it or not].
Am I allowed to ask if it be might be libellous to call BASC “a leading science-based organisation”?! ;)
If BASC thinks the monitoring is so significant and that it has been done in a flawed way…why dont they undertake the work themselves? That way they would get to promote the success of their own initiative….. Sadly that would expose their internal conflicts between science and spin.