“I don’t think it’s great for those animals, or your kids or family,” Smith said of lead, which is known to endanger unborn children, cause anemia and damage the kidney and brain.

Brian Prax was another convert at the range who mostly shuns lead ammunition while hunting “because of the environmental impacts” of the traditional bullet and shot. Add range shooter Trevor Klein to the group; “I don’t really want to eat meat that’s got lead in it,” the 30-year sportsman said.

In Teton County, where both wildlife conservation and hunting are of high interest, the statements of the three randomly selected shooters might encourage Bryan Bedrosian. The raptor biologist has seen and treated too many bald and golden eagles weakened by toxic lead bullet fragments scavenged from hunted carcasses left in the field.

As the big game season in Wyoming gets into full swing, Bedrosian’s lead-free advocacy enters its second year under the umbrella of the non-political educational nonprofit Sporting Lead-Free.

“We’re gaining traction,” Bedrosian said in a call from atop a Montana hill where he was trapping eagles.

Sporting Lead-Free, which Bedrosian co-founded, doesn’t advocate for banning lead ammunition or fishing tackle. Instead the group works to edify hunters and anglers about the environmental and health advantages of alternative metals such as copper, along with those metals’ performance relative to lead.

“We’re against regulation and litigation and feel education is the ticket,” Bedrosian said. The approach helps “steer the conversation away from any type of anti-hunting message or distrust in science,” the organization states. Those tactics have often been used to oppose lead-bullet regulations.

Many of Sporting Lead-Free’s board members, staffers and ambassadors — a cadre of 35 public-facing activists — appear on the organization’s website while afield fishing or hunting.

“We want to build a community of hunters and anglers that is in no way anti-hunting or angling,” Bedrosian said. The conservation director at the nonprofit Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, he launched the lead-free sporting group in 2020, building on seven published research papers linking lead bullets to deleterious effects on wildlife.

Bedrosian has studied birds of prey for 20 years, including golden and bald eagles that rely on Wyoming and Montana’s winds and open spaces. The pro-hunting educational approach could help counter charges that promoters of lead-free bullets are deviously using the issue to stop hunting, tread on the Second Amendment and even promote predators like wolves.

Lead ammo is “under attack by many anti-hunting groups whose ultimate goal is to ban hunting,” the National Rifle Association states on its website. “Anti-hunting groups and gun control supporters want lead ammunition banned for hunting to raise the cost of ammunition and, as a result, to dissuade people from participating in hunting and acquiring firearms for that purpose.”

Sidestepping a political trap door allows some hunting groups to accept, if not endorse outright, the use of non-lead ammunition.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that boasts more than 40,000 members, for example “encourages sportsmen and women to consider the voluntary use of non-lead ammunition and fishing tackle.” It also backs using the “best available science” when considering the effects of various elements released into the wild environment.