4 Ways to Reduce Lead Content in Your Deer Meat

Every year, millions of hunters venture into the woods to try and bag a trophy deer. The main motivational factor for many hunters is the tasty meat of the animal they take down. Deer meat, or venison, is a tasty advantage. And the fact that you killed it yourself makes it that much better. But some evidence is suggesting that a lot of lead from the bullets we kill them with is ending up on our plates. This has the potential to be very troublesome. Some say that the evidence is weak, comparing the amount of people who eat deer they shot over the hundreds of years in hunting history and documented cases of sickness related to lead ingestion. But the fact remains, eating lead is just never good. This is especially true of hunters who have children, as it is proven that the younger a person is the more likely they are to be negatively affected by eating lead fragments.

There is no doubt that some of the deer meat that hunters kill and eat likely contain some traces of lead. But there are a few ways to try and cut down the amount of it as much as possible.

1. First, buy better quality bullets. The cheap rounds may hit your wallet a little softer, but this is not an expense that should be spared. Cheap bullets fragment more upon impact. That means the discount brand bullets you bought, when they hit the thick muscle and sometimes rib cage of the animal, will blister and split apart all over the place. Avoid this by buying the more expensive brands. They "mushroom" on impact as well, but resist fragmentation much better.

2. If you cut your own meat, try to be a little discriminatory in what you throw in the grinder. Many hunters will take some of that chest meat very close to the impact wound and toss it in with other edible meat. In fact, I've seen it happen personally on more than couple of occasions. Instead of scraping out every possible piece out to get more out of your deer, it is better to just leave the parts that look a little iffy in the scrap pile.

3. If you are hunting solely for the meat and not for trophy reasons, or it's the last day of the season and you're not going to pass up a spike buck or doe, try giving a different shooting technique a try. It will take more practice and be a little tougher, but shooting the deer in the head is undoubtedly the safest (and likely most effective) way to kill the animal. Also, you are pretty much guaranteed 100% contamination free meat.

4. Along the same lines, don't spray the deer with bullets. If you just wounded the animal and have to shoot it again to kill it, get close enough to where you can shoot it in the head. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that shooting it twice in the body will automatically double the lead content of the meat in certain areas.

Following these guidelines you should be able to minimize the amount of lead that ends up on the family's dinner plates after your next successful hunt.