I want to share this important message from our National Park Service: please don’t use rat poisons. The NPS has documented numerous predators deaths recently, in our area, including several young mountain lions and foxes all killed by eating rats who had consumed anticoagulant rat poisons.
I’m preaching to the converted here, since I doubt that many readers of this blog use rat poison, but I’m hoping some of you will share this post with your friends and relatives. The NPS has a short info page on how to control rats without using anticoagulant rat poisons.
Since moving to Portland, I’ve been pretty appalled at the attitude of a lot of homesteaders in Oregon in general. They love using poisons, and couldn’t care less about offing coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, bears, or even neighbor’s dogs that have the misfortune of crossing their property. Too many heated discussions when people start talking about shooting hawks (it is illegal, but they love the philosophy of the 3 S’s: shoot, shovel and shut up). This type of self-entitled attitude has gotten pretty tiring to me to read about (don’t get me started on the pro-pesticide/GMO crowd), and I find myself coming back to your blog for some sanity..
And, not to leave it on such a negative note (and thankfully not everyone has such a conservative backwards attitude), we need more guys like this to address big homestead rat problems: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/csp/mediapool/sites/PressDemocrat/News/story.csp?cid=1863515&sid=555&fid=181?gallery=2319042
I loved that article! I wonder if we could get him on the podcast…?
He’s not hard to get ahold of, he’s pretty active/responsive on facebook.
I hope this information gets spread far and wide… I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who use rat poison and aren’t even aware of the harm they’re causing!