Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission for purchases made through the links. I only recommend products I have personally used or recently purchased, but not yet used.

Let’s go harvest our food with poison.

Not a lot of poison, just a small projectile.

Yes, it’s fragments on impact, but that’s what we want. Fragmentation causes secondary damage, which means the deer dies faster.

What about those fragments? Are you worried about eating them? No worries, we’ll just leave those parts close to the entry wound in the field.

You want to keep the liver? Well, better make sure your shot is placed well.

What about the scavengers who’ll eat what we leave behind? I don’t know, maybe they’ll be affected, but it’s only a little bit of lead. We all have a little lead in us, right?

This is what I imagine the train of logic is for some folks contemplating their continued use of lead ammunition for hunting. Perhaps without the first line, which, for me, ruins the entire prospect of using lead to hunt.

A rebuttal to that first line could be, “Well, everything can be dangerous in the right quantity.” And while that is true, the science of lead exposure in humans and other living creatures is clear: there is no safe amount of lead you can take into your body.

Lead, despite its utility for certain human endeavors, is one of the most toxic substances we interact with. Whether it’s the Roman Empire’s ill-advised use of lead in their plumbing systems (this is why lead is Pb on the periodic table, by the way) to the deliberate neglect of modern-day plumbing in places like Flint, MI, lead kills, maims, and destroys.

Gasoline is still proudly labeled “unleaded” because we quickly realized that using lead in our fuel was causing widespread harm. Bird shot used to be made of lead pellets until science showed that waterfowl hunting was poisoning aquatic environments and contaminating drinking water.

But the last objection to using lead, the residual impacts on species that come after the hunt, is what I want to focus on in this week’s post, because too often hunters work from an isolated self-interest perspective rather than the perspective of responsibility and reciprocity.

One of the most important and impactful research papers to be published in the field of wildlife conservation came out in 2022. The authors of this study looked at lead exposure in eagles across the United States and found that nearly half of all eagles sampled had toxic levels of lead in their bodies. Nearly. Half.

Nearly half of the documented deaths of California condors — one of the planet’s most critically endangered animals — are due to lead poisoning. Sources of lead in raptors primarily come from consuming carrion (dead meat) contaminated with spent ammunition.

Old timers are fond of saying that they’ve been using lead their entire lives and never noticed a negative impact from eating animals harvested with said ammo. And one can certainly take precautions to keep lead out of their own bodies, but what about the impacts of what you leave behind?

One of the biggest issues I have with the way so many of us are socialized to relationships in these modern times is how little consideration we give to what we leave behind. We’re taught to focus on the consumption end of relationships: How much will I get? How much will it cost? Where do you put it when I have it? Rarely do we consider what will happen when I’m done using it? We simply dispose of the thing and keep it moving.

Lead doesn’t just go away. It continues to exist and lead interacts with other living organisms; it continues to pose a threat to health. We use poison to harvest our food, take the parts we want, and then the parts we don’t want are someone else’s problem. I hate that mentality.

Leaving parts of a deer in the field creates opportunities for nourishment for other relatives. We were able to coax a turkey vulture into our backyard using the fleshy remains of a deer skeleton a few years ago. On one of my first hunts, my friend/mentor looked at the gut pile I had just harvested the deer liver from and said, “The coyotes will eat the rest.”

I love that aspect of hunting. That the bounty of one life taken will nourish many other lives. Which is all the more reason to make sure that what we leave behind won’t poison our relatives and damage the community we depend on for food.

Skywoman falling is an incredible human origin story that comes from a number of Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island (North America). You can read said story in Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. I assign this chapter in almost all of my biology classes, and almost every student finds the story impactful.

In this chapter, Dr. Kimmerer contrasts the human origin story of Skywoman with that of Adam and Eve, and how the latter story anchors the view of how people in Anti-Indigenous Civilizations (AIC) build relationships with animal and plant relatives and the land. I ask students in my class how they think our current relationships with the land would change if they/we had grown up with the Skywoman story instead of Adam and Eve. After over half a decade of asking this question, student consensus consistently concludes that the difference in impact would be profound.

Our ethics come from the stories we are told and the ones we accept. Living differently almost always requires a different narrative to cement behavioral changes. Many people have heard the facts and statistics of the harm that lead ammunition causes, but remain unmoved by the prospect of change.

No single book has restructured my ecological ethics more than Braiding Sweetgrass. If you’re curious to learn a different way of looking at your place in the broader nature community, then I cannot recommend this book enough.

I talk a lot about responsibility in my content on Catch and Release fishing, so I won’t rehash too much of it here.

The short version of that line of thought I want to highlight here is this: Humans have a tremendous capacity for physical changes we can make to our environment. And the only thing that keeps that tremendous capacity from causing widespread harm is the responsibility we claim for the consequences of our actions.

Choosing to harvest relatives with poison, but abdicating responsibility for the poisoning of the relatives we know are going to feed on what we leave behind, is juvenile. Making a mess of things without consideration of putting things right after is the way a baby or toddler thinks and acts.

We can do better, because we know better, and because the harm that lead causes undermines the experiences we say we value and wish to pass on to the next generation.

We don’t inherit from our ancestors; we borrow prosperity from our descendants.

This is a paraphrased version of a saying I first heard from the Swinomish people that encapsulates my attitude and practice of firearm use for hunting

There are lots of choices for high-caliber non-lead rifle ammunition, but fewer choices for smaller caliber firearms and pellet guns. The .22 rifle is by far the most popular in the U.S., but the options for non-lead ammo are very limited. The 50-round pack of non-lead .22 ammo has unfortunately been discontinued by the manufacturer.

The .270 rounds are more expensive. The Barnes Vortex I like to shoot is $50 for a box of 20, which means each shot is $2.50. That’s more pricey than lead options, but that’s only if you consider the cost to you.

Non-lead pellet gun ammo is easy to come by, and oftentimes these firearms are used to kill animal relatives we have no intention of consuming. A 100-pack of Gamo non-lead pellets set me back $22, which is a little more than double the cost of the lead stuff.

Last month, I was invited to give a keynote address at Florida State University at the RIDER Center. What I spoke about was a distillation of the philosophy and lessons that guide my Wild Kitchen work. It’s a combination of my academic and life experiences in one talk. There are chapter titles, so you can skip around to different topics if you want. Drop a comment and let me know what you think!