BASC ‘forgets’ to mention evidence showing no difference between penetration level of lead vs steel shot in ‘game meat’

Well this is interesting, and I’d say pretty embarrassing for BASC (British Association for Shooting & Conservation).

Cast your mind back to April 2023 when I blogged (here) about how BASC’s CEO Ian Bell had written to the lead author of a scientific paper that had just been published by Cambridge University researchers, that had found that 94% of pheasants on sale in the UK for human consumption were killed using toxic lead ammunition.

The paper in question 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. The paper exposed the shooting industry’s appalling lack of progress on its much-heralded ‘voluntary transition’.

Mr Ian Bell wrote to Professor Rhys Green (Cambridge University) in March 2023 to express his “significant concerns” about the accuracy of the paper’s conclusions.

In addition, another BASC employee, Dr Conor O’Gorman, went further and wrote an unpleasant article published on BASC’s website where he slurred the SHOT-SWITCH research as “pseudoscience“.

You may recall that Professor Green wrote back to Ian Bell in April 2023 and responded, point by point, to BASC’s “significant concerns” and basically blew them all out of the water (no pun intended).

However, there’s since been a further response from Professor Green that’s been published on the SHOT-SWITCH project website (here). It turns out that after responding to Ian Bell, the SHOT-SWITCH team came across some additional research that they hadn’t included in their scientific paper because they’d previously been unaware of its existence.

Guess what that additional research was?

It was a study of what happens when you fire lead shot and steel shot into ballistic gel. The properties of ballistic gel mimic those of game tissue. This study was done by ballistics experts at Cranfield University and it showed that there was no difference between lead and steel in the extent to which they penetrate the gel, even when the gel block was covered by a pheasant skin to assess the effect of feathers/skin in reducing the depth of penetration.

This finding runs counter to the assertion by Ian Bell in his letter to Professor Green about his “significant concerns” that knowledgeable experts thought that steel shot were more likely to pass through pheasants than lead shot, which (he thought) would make the SHOT-SWITCH results wrong.

And guess who commissioned the Cranfield University study?

Yep, it was BASC.

And guess when that BASC-funded study was completed?

3rd August 2021.

That’s 20 months BEFORE Ian Bell wrote to Professor Green in March 2023, contesting the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study.

Was Ian Bell ignorant of the findings of the BASC-funded study when he wrote to criticise the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study? That would seem unlikely, given he’s the BASC CEO who presumably knows what studies BASC has commissioned/funded. Had he simply forgotten about the findings of the study that BASC funded? Or, was he well aware of the findings but just hopeful that the results would never see the light of day? Who knows. It may have been a genuine oversight but surely one of his team has since explained the BASC-funded findings to him, and how they actually support the findings of the SHOT-SWITCH study, and that BASC now owes the SHOT-SWITCH team an apology for slurring their work as “pseudoscience“?

You can read the latest response from the SHOT-SWITCH researchers to Ian Bell’s “significant concerns“, which provides more detail about how this recently-uncovered, BASC-funded research, further demonstrates that BASC’s criticisms are unfounded, and that’s being kind (see pages 3-5 below).

Many thanks to the blog reader who pointed out this latest update to me.