Large Fierce Mammal

In my article Ticks: Threat or Menace?, published on the Golden Mountain Dog Solutions blog back in 2008, I debunked an incredible litany of bad advice and disinformation provided in the popular press by way of an interview with Dr. Edith Angelopoulos who has taught parasitology at Dalhousie University for lo these 30 very odd years. Among other pearls of wisdom, her credentials and impressive CV notwithstanding, Dr. Angelopoulos stated with the greatest of authority that, once attached, a tick cannot be removed without breaking off its head which can then only be extracted by microsurgery, and that the biggest carriers of ticks are dogs. At least that time, the only connection between the delusional pronouncements of the “expert” in question (and let me be clear, I found her to be exceptionally questionable) and any sort of agenda was the fact that Lyme disease was then very much in the spotlight, and the press needed to maintain the momentum of its latest incarnation of baseless hysteria. I can’t say the same for my most recent discovery which I regard as insidiously troubling.

Yesterday while my attention was elsewhere, Mrs. LFM encountered, and made me aware of, news reports alleging the Nova Scotia Bald Eagle population to be threatened by lead poisoning.

Helene Van Doninck is a veterinarian who is listed as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Cobequid Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia which according to the organization’s website is,

… a charitable organization dedicated to providing veterinary care and rehabilitation to sick, injured and orphaned wildlife.

A laudable goal if ever there was one.

This morning, Ms. Doninck was interviewed on the CBC radio show Information Morning in which she elaborated on her findings. With all due respect, while I found her to be very well spoken, and she went out of her way to repeatedly state that she has met with nothing but support from hunters and hunting organizations, I personally find that her ever so reasonably stated argument carries the stink of somebody’s bullshit agenda about it.

The allegation is that Bald Eagles are becoming sick and or dying in increasing numbers almost exclusively due to ingestion of lead particles embedded in the carcasses of animals they have eaten. Ms. Doninck says the source of these particles is predominantly the ammunition used by hunters, with lost lead fishing tackle taking up the slack as the secondary source.

Many years ago, lead shot expended over wetlands by waterfowl hunters was found to be the primary source of a similar problem affecting birds and animals that lived in down range areas. There was sound science behind the decision to move waterfowl hunting away from lead shot to the currently mandated steel shot that quickly turns to rust once exposed to the environment. Hunting a small, fast moving target like a bird requires the use of a shotgun which, as its name implies, is primarily designed to discharge a load of pellets rather than a single projectile. Bird hunting requires that the hunter fill the air around his quarry with as many projectiles as possible to ensure the impact of a sufficient number to bring it down. This means that the majority of pellets fired at any given target will miss and eventually settle to the bottom of whatever piece of boggy real estate or body of water the bird was flying over when it was being shot at. Unlike hunting for upland and big game, where encounters with the quarry will almost never occur anywhere near the same physical location time after time, a lot of waterfowl hunting is done in traditional locations, firing from blinds that may have been in use for generations. Couple that with the number of shotgun shells fired at each bird, the number of birds engaged on any given outing, the number of outings per season, the fact that there will often be more than one hunter in any given firing position, and you have yourself a lot of lead. This issue was resolved back in the nineties, and all arguments of ballistic inferiority aside, steel shot now reigns (and possibly at times rains) supreme across the wetlands and shorelines of North America.

While hunting of all types has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, most notably among women, this upswing comes at the end of a lengthy decline precipitated by the urbanization of society and Walt Disney. For lead particulates deposited in animal flesh by the impact of bullets fired by hunters to be having such negative health effects on high level predatory animals would require those animals to be feeding almost exclusively on offal left at kill sites, and animals that escaped wounded to die elsewhere. Hunting using firearms in Nova Scotia is limited to only part of the calendar year, and while Eagles are opportunistic and will feed on carrion, references to similar effects being observed in corvids – Ravens and Crows – that feed predominantly on carrion, are noticeably absent from the argument. Also, to argue that a single or sporadic feeding would result in ingestion of a lead dose that would lead to heavy metal poisoning over time ignores the biology and, coming from a doctor of veterinary medicine, speaks more to an attempt at legitimizing a sales pitch than anything approaching real science.

What I sense here is an ever so reasonably presented, gentled so as to be perceived as non-threatening, attempt to curtail hunting by suggesting that the ammunition used in its pursuit is harmful to the environment, completely ignoring the fact that modern human society continues to contaminate everything with a lethal cocktail of effluent, only one component of which is lead.