10/10/2026
*Warning: tough post ahead regarding poison/rodenticide.* Please scroll past if you aren’t in a good mental place to read this. Don’t worry- the animals pictured here were not poisoned and are fine.
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We need to talk about poison (rodenticide). I understand that people and businesses don’t want wild rats and mice coming into their homes. However, the fact that so many default to the “easy solution” of poison is egregious. Here’s why:
1. Rodenticide is not a quick, easy, or painless death for animals. The two most common types are anticoagulants, which cause the blood to stop clotting and the animal to bleed out internally, and non-anticoagulants, which work in different ways but often affect the nervous system or other organs, also leading to death. The majority require multiple dosages. What that clinical verbiage translates to is tough to put into words as you hold a dying animal, sometimes a baby poisoned through mom’s milk or the food she brought back, and everything you try is too little, too late.
2. Rodenticide doesn’t just kill the target species. While rats or mice may be the intended animals, many other species are frequently fatally poisoned, including squirrels, chipmunks, voles, opossums, groundhogs, and more.
3. Rodenticide kills its way up the food chain via secondary poisoning; a struggling or recently deceased mouse or rat is an easy target for animals like hawks, owls, foxes, skunks, as well as domestic pets like cats and dogs. In one study, 96% of tested birds of prey at Tufts were positive for at least one rodenticide. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28669046/
What to do instead:
1. Look for where the animals are coming in and repair or block any holes; remove anything that might be attracting them, such as outdoor cat food, bird feeders, etc.
2. Utilize non-lethal reproductive control for rodents, such as Evolve by Senestech. https://senestech.com/collections/evolve-mouse
3. High-quality snap traps or shock traps aren’t perfect but are still considered far more humane. Glue traps are not an ethical option.
