Zest to kill rats creating a new Silent Spring?

From the Audubon Society (linked to in the Dig article):

Many of Murray’s patients don’t have enough red-blood cells to deliver oxygen to their tissues, so they are logy. Their heads droop, the linings of their mouths are pale; some bleed from their eyes, nose, lungs, or other organs. In 2011 she found rodenticides in 86 percent of the raptor livers she examined, and all but one contained brodifacoum, especially deadly to birds. She rehabilitates some patients by injecting them with vitamin K, but the birds still retain rodenticides and are likely to accumulate more after they are released.

There’s no safe place or safe delivery system for second-generation rodenticides. After a rodent partakes, it stumbles around for three to four days, displaying itself as an especially tempting meal not just for raptors but for mammalian predators, including red foxes, gray foxes, endangered San Joaquin kit foxes, swift foxes, coyotes, wolves, raccoons, black bears, skunks, badgers, mountain lions, bobcats, fishers, dogs, and house cats—all of which suffer lethal and sublethal secondary poisoning from eating rodents. Deer, nontarget rodents, waterfowl, waterbirds, shorebirds, songbirds, and children suffer lethal and sublethal poisoning from eating bait directly.

This is a stupid thing to be putting into the food chain, especially to prevent a hypothetical problem that hasn't happened.

^{( from another rat-based post today on NextDoor )}

Rodenticide and lead show up in far too many injured wildlife, especially birds of prey. And they both come from human sources, although for lead may have been in the environment from some time ago as it doesn't really good away.

I'm glad to see the rodenticide part of it getting some attention, since we can stop it by using other methods of rodent control. (Sticky traps are bad too, especially outdoors, as they can easily catch and kill unintended animals).

My part of Somerville used to be raptor central. This year, we've seen / heard hardly any.
There's a big squirrel problem here, and one of the neighbors took matters into their own hands, laying bait out. Word got around, and they had Animal Control called on them. Makes me wonder, though, how many other people are doing this who haven't been caught, and what the impact is going to be?

I love the hawks. In addition to keeping rodent population down, they helped with the other big nuisance wildlife problem - pigeons.

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She notes a threat to children, but gives nothing to back that up. I mean, my son doesn't go into the poison containers, which are designed to ensure kids don't do that. Nor does he eat dead rats, or wild birds of prey.

I mean, other than that, the article was good, and the threat to the ecosystem should be noted, but she does throw out that "what about the children" line lazily.