"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
Not sure if you're American or not but here's a question for you. These bald eagles are allegedly dying from lead poisoning from eating creatures shot by lead bullets/pellets. This must mean they are scavenging. Yes, I know bald eagles do that a lot but they also kill their own prey. So why aren't vultures dying of this lead poisoning. Vultures only scavenge so it should happen much more often.
Here's another thought. 80% of eagles brought into a clinic may be dying of lead poisoning but that 80% is part of a small number overall. Notice they never say how many eagles are brought in.
Here's another thought for you: When someone says such and such is the fastest growing demographic for such and such a thing, it could just mean that there were very few such incidences. 2 such incidences occurred when there used to be just one. WOW! Hundred percent increase? Such incidences have DOUBLED!
Don't let Rita Skeeter twist your thoughts. Get the whole story.
Ingestion of lead ammunition is the primary reason California Condors (obligate carrion eaters) almost became extinct, are still endangered, and aren't having the greatest success with being reintroduced.
As for bald eagles, they're lazy smart, if they see takeout just sitting there, they're not gonna make dinner from scratch.
Secondary reply: I don't know If I'd call bald eagles smart. When I drive by a road kill that has vultures and a bald eagle feasting at it, the vultures fly away from the road while the stupid eagle flies right in front of my car. I've nearly had them smash into my windshield several times. It is now my standard reaction to slow down if I see a bald eagle eating road kill. I don't worry about the vultures because they know what to do.
BTW, bald eagles were nearly driven extinct by DDT. We quit using that so bald eagles are now numerous enough that I have to brake to keep from hitting while they eat road kill despite the lead poisoning.
I couldn't tell you and I don't really care. Just jumping on the opportunity to mock gun culture
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?
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.
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
Let's try the not poisonous bulltes first. Because something tells me that Americans can't even do that.
Plenty of people hunt for food. Lead ammo should be avoided though.
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.
... bang bus murder ape
Adding that into my book of wonderful phrases.
The side effects of such widespread gun usage in the US are a bummer, but at least that proliferation of guns protected your country from being overrun by a tyrannical facist government.
It's amazing how well their gun culture stopped the tyrannical dictatorship from taking over!!!!
The gun culture is the fascists. So yeah it was a success.
Step one was convincing these paranoid morns that the "real fascists" were people asking other politely to stop using slurs.
Best they could do for 4 years after an armed, violent attempted coup..... was nothing.
Hard to believe nothing didn't work. Back to the drawing board, maybe we can try caving to the demands of the rich and connected, the middle of the road voters surely want to get screwed without consent by the rich, but with gay marriage and more concern expressed about people getting hurt. Where is liz cheney, we can use her as the running mate, this is going to work great.
Good point, thank god, wait a minute...
You can use steel shot
The US banned lead birdshot in 1991. Are they eating squirrels?
Eagles will eat just about anything they physically can so probably lots of squirrels, rabbits, smaller possums and raccoons but also eagles will sometimes eat carrion so I could certainly imagine they sometimes get this off something like a deer carcass.
People still use lead target shells all the time
Unfortunately, the most American thing this girl had ever heard of is also strongly affecting white-tailed sea eagles and other raptors in Germany and neighboring countries. Choose lead free ammo, folks. https://www.bund.net/themen/naturschutz/jagd/bleimunition/
This is not exclusively an American problem. Eagles in the Italian alps are dying mostly of lead poisoning, too.
Ban lead bullets then. Allows people to keep hunting while preventing more pollution in the wild.
Plenty of time after that to ban other things.
We did that in California. It worked.
That's a very un-American solution. I think it would be much better to sell fire arms to eagles so they become aware of the problem and they can effectively hunt fresh prey and thereby circumvent the entire issue.
Why is lead used at all? Why not steel?
Lead is denser, it weighs more per volume, so it travels farther and faster when propelled by an explosion. Uranium works even better, which is why they use depleted uranium in some military applications, as it's more dense than lead, quite a bit better. Gold or platinum would work better too as they are heavier.
Fun fact, in a half billion years or so, the element of uranium decays into lead.
I read this twice. I'm trying to comprehend. The problem, I think I comprehend absolutely perfectly but my soul doesn't want to. Am this close to screaming until hoarse and sweaty. Am at work so will see if I need to do this in the parking lot.
I dream sometimes of all the regressives in the world getting into a rocket ship and blasting off for some fantasy Planet B, leaving the progressives behind to clean up the mess.
And we do, and it's terrible, but slowly the world heals.
Then the regressives realize that Planet B is too far away, and that Earth is actually faring pretty well now, and they try to come back.
When we don't let them set foot on Earth, they promise to nuke us from space, and then there's this standoff with them in orbit pointing a weapon at the only place that can support their progeny.
Ehh...rarher choose no bullets at all? 🙄
Yes, sure, it was "let's talk about how to optymize our 'mmunition" kind of meme.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
