Ladies and Gentlemen:

I lived in California for eight years. I've vacationed there on and off for a few years more. I bounced around a lot of it.

I never saw a California Condor.

My question is has the intellectual and passionate desire to save this bird morphed into a ready attack on ammunition, which is the manna of the anti-hunter?

I'm all for saving the bird, and I'll shoot Barnes copper bullets where the bird eats, but what is the big money behind this "crusade" really all about?

Sincerely,

Chris Bemis

It has nothing to do with the birds. It's all about trying to price and scare the average guy out of hunting.

Look at the growing crys to ban ALL lead ammunition, including the destruction of all current stocks.

Consider the new move to ban hunting ammunition through the ranges of other birds of prey, such as the Bald and Golden Eagles.....That's almost all entire US.

My favorite is the claims that we hunters are endangering our families by eating meat killed with lead bullets. Do they really think we are too stupid to cut out the bloodshot meat before we grind it into hamburger?

Well, of course they do. The gun grabbing liberals all believe we are stupid bubba's, that need to be protected from ourselves by turning in all our lead ammunition to the goverment. Match this with the new calls in places like CA for Ammunition registration, and you have backdoor gun registration....and given the change, we all know where that leads.

You guys are right. It's not about the birds, it just doesn't make sense to be about the birds. I've hunted and guided in our area my whole life. Even been part of local ornithology field trips through the local university. I've seen more mountain lions in the wild in this area than anyone I know. But I've NEVER seen a condor in this area. In fact my family has ranched in this region since the 1880's and there are no stories of anyone in the family ever seeing a condor here.

That reality didn't stop them from making lead bullets illegal here under the guise of "saving" the nonexistent condors.

What most people don't realize is how insidiously this non-lead ban was drafted. As written it is illegal to POSSESS lead bullets in a "hunting area". Currently simple possession, when not related to hunting, isn't being fully enforced... but that makes all of us practicing and sighting-in on ranches with lead bullets criminals. The "hunting area" isn't defined. Could any outdoor shooting range be defined as a hunting area? Could someone who lives on a ranch and shoots and hunts right from their house be illegally possessing lead bullets in their home under this law???

Just as overwhelmingly frustrating is the "lead content" portion of the legislation. I believe that I read their definition of a "non-lead" bullet was required to have less than 1% lead. My research showed that the copper used for bullets typically has 1 to 3% lead. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) So if the law is strictly enforced.... do we even have ANY legal hunting bullets???

See what sort of fun Big Brother stuff is headed your way with this lead ban junk???

Now I'm hearing talk that the anti's are considering using eagles as the next vehicle to ban lead. They've got a terribly successful precedent set by the lead ban here in the southern part of California. Just like the bad science they used to get the original law passed, there will be studies on how wonderful the ban has been for wildlife... suggesting it be expanded.

On one of the ranches we hunted heavily there is one spot where all the entrails and hides get dumped from the game that's taken. Until recently those animals were nearly always killed with lead bullets. For as long as I can remember a pair of golden eagles have nested immediately above that dumping area and raised their chicks off of what we dumped every spring. While the pig numbers were going up, so did the eagle numbers on all the ranches we hunted. Direct observation has shown the eagle population thriving from lead killed left-overs. Don't think for a second that will stop further anti-lead legislation.

Eagles occur in most of the USA. What voters, not familiar with hunting or the use of lead bullets, will vote against banning the use of lead bullets to "save" majestic birds of prey? They're our national symbol for goodness sake, I can see the ads for voters now! Lead is a four letter word to voters. Put the word "lead" in a bill and it gets passed. It's a brilliant strategy and its working.

The anti's are doing a terrific job of dividing and conquering hunters and shooters. Watch any of these similar threads as examples... Several people will quickly jump in to say how much they hate California and that they could care less what happens to the hunters here (thanks BTW). Divide and conquer, divide and conquer. It's been a strategy used to win battles for many years and its working yet again.

Kyler brings up a great point in general. There is a lot of division amongst the hunting community. There is little division amongst anti-gun/hunting people. They don't care if the gun is for shooting at the range, hunting deer, or protecting your family. It's a gun and therefore it's bad in their opinion. Same for hunting, they could care less if you spent 2 weeks freezing in Alaska to shoot a moose or went into a pen to shoot a lion. It's all hunting (or killing of an innocent animal in their words) and, in their opinion, bad.

What we, as hunters, need to do is focus on two things. Do you like to hunt and do you like to own guns (answer to both should be a unanimous yes). Doesn't matter if you hunt only fair chase with a bow or behind a fence with a full machine gun. When it comes to protecting our freedom to hunt, we need to stand together on every issue related to guns and hunting. For every little victory the antis get (like the CA lead ban), it creates a stepping stone that gets them closer to their goal of banning hunting and guns. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

I hope all you California handgun shooters are stock piling ammo right now, BTW. February is right around the corner.

Hey Chris, There "used to be" a Condor Hugger who posted here by the name of Skinner. He eventually destroyed his own argument against Lead Bullets by citing a CDC Study on the effects of Game Killed with Lead Bullets. They found in the study(which you can read for yourself) that the people who consumed Game Killed with Lead Bullets have Lower Lead levels in their system than people who did not eat Game Killed with Lead Bullets.

Also explained to him the "only way" to actually Save-the-Condor was to put a Hunting Season on it, come out with some tasty Condor recipes, and the Hunters would bring them back from Extinction - just as they have done with Ducks, Deer, Elk, Turkey, etc.

So, you are correct - the Condor Huggers are all about shutting down Shooting and Hunting.

Dear Hot Core:

Thanks for the CDC link. The report was informative.

Here in our locale in Pennsylvania, there are some battery plants, Exide, Deka, etc. The employees have to wear lead exposure tags, and when they limit out on lead exposure, they get sent home. The 30 day human excretion half life of lead was a worthwhile piece of knowledge in the CDC article.

I wonder what the excretion rate of lead is for a California Condor.

It may be that almost any lead exposure, gut pile or no may be too much for the bird.

Also, I wonder how other game has adapted to the 200+ years of lead bullets and particularly shot pellets imbedded in alot of the farmland here in Pennsylvania.

Of course with all of the mine tailings in the coal regions, who knows what is out there.

Palmerton, Pennsylvania with the zinc smelter is a pretty obvious example.

Sincerely,

Chris Bemis

The California Condor is the last remaining species of a group of large birds that once were widespread across north America. Their decline began before the arrival of man. California Condor numbers declined and only a few, isolated, inbred groups remained by the time the Spanish occupied California.

Over the past twenty years the condor captive breeding program has had only limited success in reintroducing the California Condor to areas that had not had any viable or stable condor population for hundreds of years. The decline of the condor from these areas could not have possibly been the result of lead poisoning, hunting, or the encroachment of civilization. Rather, the decline of the condor was, and is, part of the same natural processes that led to the extinction of the saber tooth cat and the woolly mammoth. It is no wonder that the captive breeding program is "the most expensive species conservation project ever undertaken in the United States".

Approximately 190 condors live in the wild but more than twice that many are in captivity for breeding and reintroduction. Several hundred have been released but most did not survive long. Those that did survive have not been able to create viable, self sufficient, populations. The key to survival of a species is not how many individuals survive but how many individuals can produce offspring that survive. In that regard the condor is doomed.

In biology, a relict is an organism that at an earlier time was abundant in a large area but now occurs at only one or a few small areas. The condor was already a relict hundreds of years ago.

I remember first hearing of the condors when watching the Beverly Hillbillies.

That was 35-40 years ago and they were whining about them back then.

I almost wish the dang things would go ahead and become extinct. It would save us all a lot of trouble.

I remember reading a report about this when the ban was first being talked about that said the lead levels in Condor blood were about the same as the lead levels in the surrounding environments that they lived in. There was NO science that could prove man had anything to do with lead in a condor. But since when did logic, reasoning, or common sense get used by socialists?