Though this article purports to show a divide in the hunting community about the use of lead ammunition it instead just gives an example of the NRA’s insanity. It seems to me that a group that is represented as being as pro-conservation as hunters would have no issue with not using lead ammunition. Does anyone know where the national hunting / sportsmen groups stand? Project Gutpile is great, though perhaps in need of a more user-friendly name, but does the rest of the hunting world stand with them?
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
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Or is the NRA actually representative of hunters’ opinions on this issue?
I like the name Project Gutpile; it does what it says on the tin. This issue seems to be a win-win for hunters and condors alike but I’d suggest education by interested hunters (as opposed to outsiders “preaching” in) is the best and possibly only way to get this message across given the NRA’s bizarre stance.
On a related note does anyone know if the number of condors needing chelation treatment has reduced at all since the Californian legislation was passed?
This thread and the one Julie started about hunting Sandhill Cranes has been very educational for me. Despite the literally hundreds of times I’ve been to the US, the people I know there, this blog etc, I really had failed to appreciate to what an extent your hunting lobby decides what happens in the country. Now that I do understand it seems utterly bizarre to me. At the same time as European birders and conservationists are eg increasingly pointing the finger at the extremists in the Maltese hunting lobby and demonstrating how they set the government agenda in terms of what species can or can not be shot and when and with what they can be shot, almost the exact same thing is happening in America – a country that one would not normally think to compare with Malta – where hunting’s stranglehold over the countryside is treated very much as the norm and not something to get excised about. I understand fully how growing up in a certain culture makes that culture appear the norm to those inside it but it wouldn’t be acceptable over here (no matter how much the hunters would like it) – and I finally understand why my views (which are not especially ‘out there’ as far as many British birders go) are so radical when dropped into a predominantly American conversation. Just goes to show, it’s never too late to learn – a concept that as a birder who wouldn’t kill a bird for sport under any circumstances I can only hope goes both ways.