I’ve seen Season Shot come up a couple of times recently, today on the Improbable Research blog, and a few months ago on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. The tagline is “Ammo With Flavor”, and the idea is that it’s shotgun shot with seasoning in it, so you shoot the bird and just stick it in the oven. Since the majority of people who write science blogs and are on NPR comedy shows have never intentionally killed an animal in their lives (not that there’s anything wrong with that), there hasn’t been a lot of scrutiny on this. So I’ll step up.

It’s a joke.

If you listen to Wait, Wait much, you know that there really is a lot of crazy stuff out there. Compared to the fact that the recently deceased Turkmenbashi renamed several months of the year after his relatives, this isn’t too far off.

Three things that it’s a joke (not that I really need to, but read the third one, it’s important):

  • Oregano is not aerodynamic.
  • Gunpowder tends to get hot when it explodes. It would burn any thing that was near it, at least so that it wouldn’t taste good.
  • And the most important thing: the claim that you can leave the shot in the bird and it dissolves. Shotgun shells have commonly used lead pellets in the past. Lead isn’t so good for the environment. So, when shooting out over water, where most ducks and geese are shot, hunters buy more expensive steel and bismuth shot. If there was a something that was both (1) able to kill a bird and (2) dissolved, then the demand for it would be huge. Huge. Much huger than novelty shotgun shells.