02/22/2025
I don't know if people are aware, or really get it: but rat poisons? These products are tested on animals.
And not just mice and rats, the animals people expect and are usually ok with the thoughts of humans experimenting with.
Rat poisons are tested in both labs and controlled experiments on wildlife. Do you know the most popular test subjects for anticoagulants in the US? Kestrels, and for a time, Eastern screech owls. These screech owls and kestrels would be fed poisoned rodents and the experimenters would report them while their eyes and wings bled, while they collapsed on the floor of the labs seizing and sometimes spitting up blood.
And rat poisons are not just tested on owls and kestrels, but cats and dogs. Some of these dogs were seized from animal shelters. They were once people's pets. Neve heard of pound seizures? Lucky you. In quite a few states, it's still legal for labs to roll up to shelters and seize dogs for experiments. In this case, dogs were fed poisoned possum carcasses until they, too, died.
I have to read about these experiments for the book I am writing. I have to understand these things on an intimate level I frankly often would rather not. These studies sometimes give me nightmares.
And you know what guts me? These animals die, often painful lonely deaths. The experiments show these animals--dogs, cats, owls, kestrels, etc.--die of secondary poisoning, often at much lower doses than what experimenters originally thought would kill them. But then nothing changes, the poisons are still allowed on the market and out into the environment where more animals die in nature like those that did in the lab.
So these lab animals suffered for what? Tell me, for what? Because it seems to me the findings aren't even being heeded.
So if you use rat poisons--ANY rat poison, not just anticoagulants--- your money is propping up a product that has killed untold numbers of dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, weasels, owls and kestrels in laboratory experiments.
The $$ to apply these products support frivolous and inhumane animal testing not for a breakthrough drug that will cure cancer or vaccinate against disease, but to prove again and again and again what we should already know: rat poisons move up the food chain.
They kill and kill and kill and kill.
ETA: For FB tax, a dead barred owl, that collapsed into someone's backyard abutting Spy Pond in late November. He died minutes later in the woman's arms. Necropsy revealed internal bleeding and liver panel testing proved SGARs exposure in lethal range. Photo courtesy Arlington at resident Jeanine Barletta.
