Why some hunters are moving away from lead bullets

"Cameras trained on a dead elk in an Oregon preserve captured the many animals who feed on such carcasses. State agencies have urged hunters to stop using lead ammunition, citing devastating impacts on wildlife," The New York Times reports.

A few hunters are making the switch from lead to copper bullets as evidence mounts that lead bullets poison the wildlife that feeds on carcasses and pollute the game meat people eat.

"According to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, lead exposure is the leading cause of death in California condors, the largest land birds in North America, which three decades ago were on the brink of extinction," Ian Urbina reports for The New York Times. "And between 10 million and 20 million animals, including eagles, hawks, bears, vultures, ravens and coyotes, die each year not from being hunted, but from lead poisoning," says the Humane Society of the United States.

Urbina reports that about 95 percent of the 10 billion to 13 billion rounds of ammunition purchased in the U.S. each year contain lead, and that hunters reluctant to switch "cite a range of reasons, from being unaware of the potential health threat or harm to scavenger animals," including bald eagles, "to having a stockpile of traditional ammunition they do not want to waste. Some also see the push away from lead bullets as a ruse for limiting gun rights or banning hunting more broadly. And many hunters question the availability, accuracy, price and lethality of non-lead ammunition."

The National Rifle Association and the firearms industry may have contributed to hunters' reluctance to switch by funding a nonprofit called Hunt for Truth. The organization was meant to protest California's attempt to ban lead ammunition in 2013. The group's website was taken down after the NRA was outed as its major funder, but the organization lives on as a Facebook page.

The site "claimed that lead used in bullets is not sufficiently soluble to dissolve in most animals’ digestive tracts," Urbina reports. "Lynn Tompkins, who runs a bird rehabilitation center called Blue Mountain Wildlife in Pendleton, Ore., rejected those ideas. She held up photographs of X-rays of birds with lead bullet fragments in their stomachs, and said that roughly half of those she treats have lead poisoning." She told Urbina, "I’m not opposed to hunting. But we moved away from lead in gasoline, paint and plumbing, and now we need to do the same with ammunition."