this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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"Choose lead free ammunition"
No?
Just stop shooting guns and murdering things like a crazy ape?
The American mind cannot comprehend this. Probably due to neurological symptoms from lead poisoning or sth
What are you even talking about? There are plenty of people that hunt even here in Germany.
Americans don't have a monopoly on hunting.
I'm talking about a whole country being obsessed with owning and firing guns. I don't observe that in Germany. Also a hunters license comes with mandatory education about responsibility and preserving wildlife.
So do hunting licenses in the US. Wildlife enforcement has some of the most authority in the state.
The issue is the states allow inherently unsafe munitions to be used. If they changed hunters in the US would comply
We have a monopoly on hunting 30-50 feral hogs tyvm
The overwhelming majority of bullets are used against paper or steel targets. Most hunters take the entire carcass for butchering, so the eagles aren't eating lead from animals shot and left in the wilderness. And given the volume needed, I wouldn't be surprised that they're eating fragments fired at steel targets that they mistake for rocks to keep in their stomach to grind up food.
Don't know what they do over there, but we usually get the lungs and guts out as soon as possible in order to keep the meat from spoiling. Long lived predators that likes to scavenge can develop lead poisoning from those remains if it's their main source of food.
If confusing with rocks was the main source you'd expect it to be just as common in other birds.
Does that mean hunters also eat lead?
You tend to be generous with what you discard because you don't want to eat lead.
I could only find one report where they measured Pb in blood. People who self reported eating game meat in Utah had 30% higher lead levels than people who did not.
This is untrue, gastroliths are associated only with birds that eat plants. They grind up food, which isn’t necessary for meat. Eagles eat bullets from animals that have either been shot and abandoned, lost, or had parts of them discarded as zqxwas pointed out.
Let's try the not poisonous bulltes first. Because something tells me that Americans can't even do that.
OK, I think this is an incredibly stupid argument.
From the ethical perspective of anti-meat, hunting animals is so much better. They get to live natural lives, and they die in a similar manner to they do in nature (maybe a little faster, which is good).
From an environmental perspective, hunting keeps pray populations in naturally healthy levels, since most of their predators are driven out of populated areas, because people don't like to be attacked by wild animals. It also doesn't consume many resources, as they're just living their lives in nature.
I don't think there's any valid argument against hunting honestly, besides just being grossed out by it. That's fine, and you can just not do it. I've never hunted in my life, and I suspect I never will. It's not really something I want to do. I can't construct a good argument against it though, and I suspect you can't either. If you can, give it a shot, and remember animals dying and being eaten is natural, and frequently necessary to maintain an equilibrium that was evolved to be maintained by external factors. Deer, for example, will die horrible deaths of starvation, and do damage to the environment, if they aren't hunted by humans.
Crazy ape comment aside (i'd put it closer to apes with delusions of grandeur but that's just me), not shooting guns and allowing hunting aren't mutually exclusive.
Especially given all the hunting that happened pre-gun.
I don't know if it's on purpose but your answer seems to be ignoring a lot of the realities of how the things you are proposing would work (or not work, as the case may be).
Sure, you can hunt without guns. I don't really see an argument for not using them though, as long as there's no lead. What's really the ethical or environment argument in favor of only allowing bows, or whatever? I see the emotional appeal, if people have a negative view of guns. Not a logical appeal though, besides maybe making them harder to access to prevent deaths by firearms. If you can ban hunting with firearms, you can also just ban using lead ammo, so I don't see how banning them is the best option in general.
I didn't make any proposals in my above comment. It's entirely statements of observations. I don't know what you mean by saying you don't see how they would work or not. I gave explanations of why hunting isn't negative, and is often positive, but not any proposals of how anything should be done. Would you care to elaborate?
Where I grew up, most people use a Have-a-Heart trap or a snare, then a knife or captive bolt gun (no bulltets).
Scenario A: You're minding your own business, when a bullet passes through your heart/lungs and you're dead in seconds.
Scenario B: You get caught in a trap and wait for hours for an ape with a knife or a bolt gun to come along and finish the job.
Honestly, if I were an animal, I'd prefer Scenario A.
Have-A-Heart traps are used by animal welfare groups and animal shelters, so I don't know if it's so bad to wait in the trap, unless said animal groups are incorrect to use said traps. Admittedly, cats who have never encountered these traps sometimes freak out when first trapped, and cats who have seen them before can outsmart them easily. I've never thought they were good for trapping cats, as they are specifically designed NOT to trap cats.
Have-A-Heart traps are intended to trap furbearing animals but allow for the release of cats, dogs or endagered species. You've probably seen them before. These staps are box rectangle shaped, chrome colored, and are activated when the animal places their weight on the lever in the back of the trap. These are also called double door traps.
Bolt guns are commonly used in animal slaughter and are often considered 'humane.' If you eat red meat, the cow was likely killed with a captive bolt gun.
I'm familiar with all of the technology involved, but I'm not sure about the applications you're describing.
With a Have-A-Heart, the specific goal is live capture and release. There is no killing involved. The animal might be properly freaked out at the experience of being trapped, but that is specifically so as to permit an animal's live relocation.
With a bolt gun, it's meant to be used in a slaughterhouse scenario, which is a whole moral discussion of its own, but at bare minimum one wants the animals to be kept as calm as possible until the bolt gun is applied, because stressed out meat tastes worse than calm and placid up until the moment of death.
With hunting, the goal is to kill the target as cleanly as possible, preferably with a single bullet. That's the Scenario A I'm describing above.
If one were hunting an animal with the intent of killing it, then a trap, followed by a knife or bolt gun, would maximize the terror felt by the animal to be killed. Sure, one may be putting less lead out in the environment, but at the cost of putting the animal through... almost the most appalling experience of death possible, with the admitted exception of a poorly-aimed bullet or arrow, followed by a wounded flight through the woods and slowly bleeding out.
So... if one's absolute maximum goal is to reduce environmental lead, yes, that is one way to do it, but the moral implications of that method seem pretty rough.
That works. I'm not saying you can't hunt with other methods. I'm just saying that I can't see much of an argument against the use of leadless firearms for hunting, besides a weak gun control one (hunting weapons aren't a significant portion of the danger from firearms, mostly handguns or rifles like the AR-15). People can hunt however they want, or not at all, as long as it is controlled to healthy levels and doesn't cause any other issues, and, ideally doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to the animal.
Isn't the AR-15 the most popular rifle to hunt with in the US?
To hunt? No. I don't even think it's legal to hunt with it. It is the most popular rifle, but it isn't for hunting. It's for target shooting (in theory, if it's for sport), or "self-defense".
A quick search shows it's prohibited in just 4 states. Many states have conditions that apply to configuration of rifles (and shotguns) such as capacity limits, so those would affect them the same.
Just because something happens on its own in nature doesn’t mean it’s a good thing per se - for instance, I prefer the warmth of my heated house over the "natural" cold temperatures of the winter months. That’s the famous "appeal to nature" fallacy right there.
Also, like others already pointed out, hunting deer is only necessary because we eradicated most of their natural predators. Making the case for hunting today in order to fix a problem hunting created in the past feels oddly circular to me.
I mean, kinda yes, kinda no. We generally weren't hunting predators primarily for meat, but for community safety. The meat from predators was a byproduct of not wanting a bear or something to decide our children would make for a tasty snack.
It's just those predators were also what kept prey populations under control, so now we have to take over that role in order to prevent their extinction. Left to their own devices, they'll overgraze and kill the areas ability to support them, and then they all die because the area won't necessarily bounce back quickly enough as they die of starvation.
An appeal to nature is only wrong if it's saying something is good because it happens in nature. I don't believe I did so, except maybe saying it's ethically better for them to live in nature than in slaughter houses. I'd love to see an argument in favor of horrible large-scale animal raising though. That'd be interesting.
It being evolutionarily necessary isn't an appeal to nature. It's just stating a fact. It isn't a judgment. It's just a statement that overpopulation causes massive issues, and prey animals evolve to have tons of children because they were hunted (by other animals than humans) . Without hunting of some kind, their populations balloon out of control.
It's not circular, because it needs to be done. If it isn't done we have massive problems. It doesn't depend on any other logic. Sure, the issue was created, in part, by hunting also (a lot just because predators won't live near population centers though), but the argument that it needs to be done isn't dependent on you agreeing with killing predators.
A little off subject, but I want to start a movement to have farmers raise a few cows and pigs in the old method, letting them roam around and forage, not treating them horribly, and then selling the meat directly to consumers. Because if you bought an entire cow's worth of cuts at a grocer, it's an astronomical sum, even as the rancher is getting barely enough to get by from it, the agriconglomerates hold the gates and are squeezing everyone, and it's forced these factory style farms to proliferate to stay in business, as the corporates won't pay enough for the old style of farming to be worth it, but still charge more than enough so that old way would more than be worth it if we cut out the parasitical mega corporations.
It's kind of baked in though, usda inspections and the like on beef, it's illegal to go outside of them really, barriers to entry that probably are ruinously expensive for someone doing a handful of cow shares, but affordable for a conglomerate doing a thousand head
But there's a way around it, doing cow share programs, selling directly to people but it's grey area.
Anyway it's a major harm reduction as far as I'm concerned. People aren't going to stop buying meat. We can give farmers more money, save consumers money, and give the animals better lives, by cutting out these mega corporations from the deal, and in doing it with meat, it's an in to do all sorts of vegetables and the like as well, we need community sponsored agriculture that is not more expensive than the grocers, and I think that's more possible now with rising grocery costs.
We killed the predators on a lot of our continent. Deer hunting is ecologically necessary here. And thats before we get into the boar problem
Not if wolves were reintroduced to native levels.
Yes, and you all understand just how controversial it is to do as well, considering that reintroducing predators is something people are trying on both our continents. Reintroducing wolves to the forests of the eastern united states may happen in my lifetime but is unlikely as the people who live where they would be enjoy hunting for meat and don't like the idea of having to shoot wolves that get too bold. They're currently controversially being reintroduced in the West like near Yellowstone. Other predators like cougars also need to be allowed to populate more. Even then though, nothing on this continent but humans is taking down boars. They're giant and massively invasive, an ecological calamity.
But for the time being, hunters should be switching to lead free shot, and they should continue hunting white tail deer. Target shooters should also be using lead free shot, in general if you don't want particles of it in your bloodstream don't shoot with it.
Plenty of people hunt for food. Lead ammo should be avoided though.
People don’t really change their actions very often. I mean, people are still posting on twitter, for example.
I think you might have some ontologically incongruous standards. We are crazy apes. You can take the guns away, but the murder will persist for millennia, if not gene edited out. Banning the guns and lead bullets is more likely to work than expecting humanity to spontaneously diverge from its evolutionary roots as a bang bus murder ape
I don't know, humans are good at diverging from their instincts when it comes to letting sick people die, but when it comes to killing less, they cannot anymore?
I think that low-ass standards are what prevent humans from getting any better, if you start justifying mindless murders as "just instinct" then of course people will be fine with it. And funnily enough, that's one of the main arguments that hunters use, saying that they're just doing something "natural".
We are killing less. And overwhelmingly so. If you don’t count faceless, recontectualized packaged cow, chicken, and pig meat. We’re also still pretty good about keeping our close group alive, but medicine men, insurance, and numbers over 100 are a strictly cultural practice not cemented within our genetic memory in any helpful way, so society as a whole suffers under the burden of our limited empathy.
You can also get into the economics of governance to get a good look at what it would mean to move the systems in place enough to reach the sort of universal socioeconomic safety that you’d personally find acceptable. I’m a fan of Europe’s deal… up to a point.
I really don’t mean to cut things off, but the scope of this conversation would necessarily reach so incredibly wide that I don’t believe I can keep your attention or mine for a dozen pages of philosophy, biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and economics. In short, I, personally, can only expect people to fit neatly into a groove so long as it isn’t too far removed from the one we dug a hundred thousand years ago. Certain people have done too much to remove themselves, and to some degree us, from personal responsibility in the US to do anything but set fire to what we have.
Adding that into my book of wonderful phrases.
Just don’t credit me, I’m pretty sure I plagiarized it in part from elsewhere