SNAIL TRAIL

We have an unusual issue. In a rockery we have had a daily count of 20 to 30 disembowelled snails, which one can rake out of the entrance. Each snail shell has been punctured and the contents eaten. We presume the perpetrator is a rat but the sheer daily volume is remarkable; more than 100 snails in a week.

If this reduces snail infestation and keeps our hostas safe, then all well and good; but does the rat find them within the flowerbeds or elsewhere?

Charlie Stott

Easter Howgate, Midlothian

their experience they had little or no evidence that lead shot, in particular, was any threat to their health. One of the reasons being given by the organisations for the proposed cessation of lead ammunition was the risk to human health from inadvertently ingesting whole or particles of shot left in the meat of game harvested with it.

In 1996, the use of lead shotgun ammunition for shooting wildfowl was banned. There were reports by the

GWCT that estimated that up to 100,000 wildfowl die and up to 400,000 suffer the effects of lead poisoning from ingesting lead shot; these figures were published in February 2015 .

If 100,000 duck and geese were dying in 2015, there should, one would reasonably think, be a marked drop in the numbers of wildfowl affected by lead poisoning since the use of lead shot was banned for wildfowl in the 24-year period since

1996. However, despite asking the GWCT and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust for figures, none has been forthcoming.

Looking through the records published by BTO, there is a general decline in the numbers of nearly all wildfowl in the UK since 1996, with many being downgraded from green to amber status.

As for human health, I decided to ask the NHS and my MP if they could give me figures for the number of people in the UK who have been diagnosed with lead poisoning in the past 20 years and, of those, how many were considered to have suffered this as a result of eating game meat that had been shot with lead ammunition. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has meant neither has been able to answer me yet but my own research seems to indicate up to 80 people a year in the UK annually suffer from lead poisoning and, in all the cases stated, those people seemed to have worked in industries either smelting or working with large quantities of lead.

I believe it is reasonable to ask those who want to phase out lead ammunition to: show the numbers of humans currently affected and harmed by lead in the food chain as a result of that food being shot with lead; show the benefit to wildfowl resulting from the removal of lead in their environment by the 1996 Act; state what metal suitable for use in sporting weapons can be shown to be non-toxic to avian scavengers.

Mark Crudgington, by email

I returned to the UK in September 2019 after 36 years living and working in southern Africa, from where I followed the lead-shot debate with interest.

Science has shown that lead is toxic to man and one cannot argue against the research that presents this as fact. However, some questions can legitimately be raised regarding the variations in how lead occurs both in the natural and manufactured environment and how or in what form it can enter, react or concentrate in living organisms, including the human body.

European technocrats concluded some years back that there was no safe level of lead ingestion, so, given the natural distribution of lead in soils, particularly those areas of higher natural concentration such as the Peak District (lead mineralisation in limestone) or Greater London (anthropomorphic lead from the built environment), according to EFSA standards, it would appear we are all theoretically doomed to gradual lead poisoning. So we could say let’s get it over with, make our choices as to what we wish to eat and move swiftly on.

But we just cannot continue to accept the on-going discharge of 5,000 to 6,000-plus tonnes of lead a year over our countryside. It simply is not the right thing to be doing and we must move to more benign alternatives and stop putting so much metal (whatever it may be) into the soil.

Mike Holman Shrewsbury, Shropshire