The lowland season starts, do we need to make any changes?

The 2024/25 shooting season got off to a fairly lugubrious start earlier this month, after many grouse moors cancelled their days. Thankfully, we are now just days away from the start of the lowland shooting season, Monday 2 September should be a corker. One thing to bear in mind is that this is the first season since 2009/10, where we’ll be going shooting under a Labour government. Although this new government is currently distracted by other policies beside shooting, we must be mindful that if we can show shooting to be the bastion for good in the countryside that we know it is, there is less likely to be heavy-handed legislative imposition. 

The easiest way that most of us can chip in to this effort is by ditching toxic substances from our shooting days. I’m talking about lead shot. At this point there may be protestations that lead isn’t harmful to health and environment, or that steel shot isn’t lethal enough. Both are myths. Lead is unquestionably toxic, there’s a reason we don’t make our water pipes out of lead any longer. Steel shot is lethal, even on high pheasants, and it can probably go through your gun’s barrels without issue. 

The next question is ‘why now?’ That’s quite simple to answer – the sooner the better. We need to show to the Government that shooting is self-aware and making uncoerced progress. We need to leave as few chinks in our armour that antis might want to exploit as possible. We need to enable a strong market for shot game, and increasingly commercial buyers don’t want to be plating up food potentially contaminated with lead. 

The first step to take, if you haven’t already tried non-lead cartridges, is to give them a go this season. See what works for you. If you buy a slab of steel or bismuth cartridges, use them with confidence on a day’s shooting this season, there’s no reason they won’t work, so long as you point your barrels in the right direction. Then the next time you stock up on cartridges, make sure you’re only buying non-toxic. The step after that is for you to become a trendsetter - far from being a bible-bashing non-lead zealot, tell your fellow guns that non-lead works for you, maybe even give them a box or two, and see what happens. If you do that, shooting should be safe for years to come, if not, we open ourselves up for unnecessary criticism.