This is an interesting paper which looks at the attitudes of a small sample (30) of male shooters to lead ammunition. It’s something called a Q-study – something unfamiliar to me.

As I understand it, the study chose the group of respondents not to be representative of the shooting community, but in fact to represent something of the range of views from well-informed participants in game shooting.

There are two camps, which I’d identify as the dinosaurs and the enlightened. The dinosaurs simply don’t believe the science, don’t believe other shooters’ experience of using non-toxic ammunition and seem to believe that shooting at live prey with non-toxic ammunition is the end of shooting. Well, that’s what they say they believe – I wonder whether they really do. Saying ‘I believe all the science but I don’t give a damn’ is unlikely to be a common response on this issue.

The enlightened group sound very sensible. If they were numerous, vocal and active then this issue would soon be ended.

So the question is ‘how many dinosaurs are there, and how many enlightened?’. We don’t know the answer to that and I wonder how we would find out. One way to get a feel for it would be to look at what the leadership of pro-shooting organisations like BASC, GWCT, Countryside Alliance and Moorland Association say – they don’t say anything enlightened on this subject and remember that their representatives behaved appallingly on the Lead Ammunition Group when they had the chance actually to do something enlightened. Another way to get a feel for the ratio of dinosaurs to enlightened would be to look at the shooting press – but that is like a trip to the Jurassic Age.

So, it seems, that the dinosaurs are in charge. And Defra sits idly by – it seems that their major nature conservation achievement is the protection of dinosaurs.

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