Shooting Times & Country Magazine

We shouldn’t rely on US steel shot study

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In his column (Sharpshoot­er, 21 September), Alasdair Mitchell is keen to report the findings of a US study on the effect of steel shot versus lead shot on mourning doves. Put simply, no difference could be found.

It would be dangerous to extrapolat­e these findings to English game shooting conditions. Mourning doves are lightly built, fragile birds. A cock pheasant is much more robustly built and nine times heavier. Even a woodcock has twice the mass of a mourning dove.

In addition, American proof regulation allows the use of ultra-high-velocity cartridges (over 1,500ft/sec) and gasoperate­d semi-automatic shotguns are in common usage. These will help dampen the inevitable recoil. All that can be gleaned from this study is that small steel shot fired at high velocity is effective on a very lightly built bird.

There are too many accounts of the wounding effect of steel shot for them to be ignored and so I would not take too much solace from the American study when facing a high cock pheasant and armed with a standard game gun loaded with No 4 steel shot at the English standard speed of 1,200ft/sec.

Stephen Judd,

East Sussex

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