Chris

Rat poison sales need to drop to zero. A 2020 study at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic tested red-tailed hawks for anticoagulant rodenticides. Every single bird came back positive. A follow-up looking at 46 hawks, owls, foxes and coyotes from a Massachusetts rehab center between 2022 and 2024 found the same thing. Anticoagulant bait doesn't kill quickly, by cruel design. It stops blood from clotting, and the rodent bleeds internally for days. During those days it gets slow, disoriented, and easy to catch. It wanders out into the open in daylight. A poisoned rat is the most attractive rat in the neighborhood. You haven't just set a trap for rodents, you've set one for everything that hunts them too. The poison is in the gut, the liver, and the carcass after death. An owl. A hawk. A fox. A bobcat. A barn owl family eats around 1,000 rodents a year, and every one of them is a chance. Your cat too, if it's outside. Cats get poisoned eating poisoned prey. The ecology runs backwards on you too. Rodents breed fast and their predators breed slowly. Kill the owls and foxes, and theoretically the mice come back harder with nothing left to hold them down. Every poisoning program has the potential to make your rodent problem worse. What actually works: - Seal the entry points. A mouse fits through a gap the width of a pencil. - Put the food away. Bird seed, pet food, garbage. That's usually the whole reason they're there. - Traps indoors, out of reach of pets and kids. Then put up an owl box and let something else do the work for free.