The BPR High School Program invites student writers from Providence-area public schools to research, draft, and edit a college-level opinion article over the course of a semester. A special thank you to the editor on this piece, Evan Tao ‘27!
Miro Meek is a senior at Classical High School.
When I brought a rat-poisoned rabbit in a little cardboard box into the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island, I could tell they had all seen cases like this before. Over the phone they had assured me they had the resources to do what they could, but there was absolutely no guarantee of the animal’s survival. I was informed later that it died minutes after I dropped it off. The neighbors who used the rodenticide were sold the same promise as everyone else who had used it before them: It is effective. It works. And it isn’t their fault that they didn’t know the consequences, it is our government’s fault for allowing the common use of this detrimental “fix.”
Many households struggling with a rat infestation will go straight for this accessible option. It’s only about $20 to buy four pounds of rat poison online, which brands claim can kill up to 160 rats. The rodenticide company Woodstream lists “ease of use” and “efficient kills” as significant advantages of using this method. Rodenticides are indeed effective: All the rats around your property could be dead in just a few days. But until then, you will have sick, slow, twitching, confused rats crawling over your property for up to five days until they die, stiff and curled up, eyes still open, in your backyard. If you think rats are gross when they are healthy, they are much scarier when they are erratic and desperate. It is easy to place around your property, and it does kill the rats, but not as quickly and simply as advertisers make it seem.
This method is not only impractical but inhumane: Rat poison kills rats, but the way it kills the animals is drawn out and painful. As stated by the Center for Biological Diversity, “most rodenticides work by disrupting the blood-clotting process, victims can suffer for days from uncontrolled bleeding or hemorrhaging, internal bleeding, cardiovascular collapse, and organ failure.” These kinds of poisons are called Second Generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides, or SGARs. Rat poison may be a fast fix for you, but it is a long, painful death for the rodents it is used on, whether it’s rats or wildlife like the rabbit I brought to the clinic.
Another thing that the companies selling rat poison aren’t telling you is that SGARs will kill your rats, but also your local wild rodents. Rat poison works the same on rabbits and squirrels as it does on rats. In addition, over 10,000 young children ingest rat poison every year in the United States, which can make them very sick, and 100 pets die every year from it. While rat poison can seem like a quick solution to a simple problem, its collateral damage proves that it has more cons than pros.
Wildlife centers all over the nation report getting multiple cases of poisoned birds and other animals every week. More often than not, there is nothing to be done to save these animals. Tufts University’s wildlife clinic found that 100 percent of 43 red-tailed hawks brought in from 2017 to 2019 carried rodenticides, and all of them died. In a TuftsNow article, a researcher explains that “There’s no such thing as a safe poison, but even among the range of poisons, anticoagulant rodenticides are a category that has very significant risks to our wildlife species.” SGARs should be a last resort if they’re even an option, but instead they’re the first thing that comes up when you search “rat poison” online.
When I got the chance to interview local wildlife clinic and animal rehabber Sheida Soleimani, I learned just how badly SGARs backfire. “The rat sees the bait, they eat the bait, and then over the course of a couple days the rat begins to slow down as its insides begin to bleed out. … In that time these rats are a lot slower, they’re not able to escape or run away, so they become really great targets for prey or predator birds,” she tells me. “What we might see as a pest is actually a food source for them.” This is where things go really awry:
“A lot of the birds we get will have bruising, they’ll be seizing, they’ll have wounds that will not clot, they become disoriented.” The SGARs won’t immediately kill a raptor, but over time, they build up. She gives the example of a barred owl that is now in her care because it was so affected by the buildup of SGARs in its body that it flew into the road and got hit by a car. The more poisoned rodents a raptor eats, the more they bleed internally, slowing them down and making it harder for them to catch healthy rodents. The more SGARs are used, the more raptors are affected and eventually killed. Not only does this mean harming sometimes endangered bird species, but it also means more rats.
Even worse, the more we use SGARs, the more resistant to them rats become, Soleimani informs me: “The SGARs aren’t working as well as they used to.” Rats populate much faster than sick raptors can catch them. By using SGARs thinking we can exterminate rats that way, we create a worse ratio of rats to raptors than we did before which just compounds the problem.
Because of all of this and more, some states and cities have already passed bills restricting or banning the use of rodenticides: Even just two hours away in Newbury, Massachusetts, the city council unanimously voted to ban second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs) on private property, and according to the Los Angeles Times a California law signed in 2020 put a moratorium on SGARs that is still active today. This begs the question: Why hasn’t Rhode Island done the same?
If you’re experiencing a rat infestation, there are much more simple and permanent solutions. The Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides lists finding and sealing places where rats might enter your home, keeping clean and sealing your food, and baiting and trapping as some options. $20 for four pounds of rat poison may seem cheap, but removing the pile of wood in your yard that the rats are living in costs nothing at all. There is even a rat contraceptive called CONTRAPEST by Senestech that stops rats and mice from being able to reproduce without killing them.
It is easy today, in 2024, to find the “best” solution online in seconds and order it straight to your home without even considering the possibility of wildlife being affected. But, as we’ve seen, not only is wildlife affected, but the use of SGARs only makes pest infestations worse. In Rhode Island, currently, the bill to restrict SGARs is being “held for further study,” the study being done now at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island. In the meantime, you can help local wildlife by donating, volunteering at, or even just following the social media of the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island or the Audubon Society of RI. Also, I recommend that you encourage your local institutions (including Brown), public spaces, and workplaces to remove SGARs from the premises. As a student at Classical High School, I have already contacted the administration at my school and the Providence Public School District after seeing black boxes (which according to Soleimani are usually filled with SGARs) against every wall outside the school and finding two visibly unharmed dead squirrels on the Classical-Central campus in the past months, and at the time of publication, neither had responded.
Lastly, if you have rats, mice, or any other kind of pest in your home, remember to research before you act!