Generally speaking, it mostly only affects the meat where lead projectiles hit. The most common lead projectiles for hunting though are shotgun pellets in shel

Generally speaking, it mostly only affects the meat where lead projectiles hit. The most common lead projectiles for hunting though are shotgun pellets in shells, which have a sizeable spread and often used for small targets like waterfowl and rodents. So a small target and a sizeable spread of pellets means that while only hit and splatter areas are affected, that could be most of the usable meat as well.