Barn owls and other raptors are being poisoned by second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides used in agriculture and pest control, causing a slow and painful death.
The slow death from rodenticide poisoning represents significant suffering for individual barn owls and other predators. Animals weakened by internal bleeding become easy to catch — ironically making them appear sick to observers — and eventually die from organ failure or external hemorrhage. The contamination rate in barn owl populations is alarmingly high, suggesting this is not a rare individual-animal problem but a systemic welfare impact across raptor populations. Transitioning to rodent management methods that do not use persistent anticoagulants is both feasible and urgently needed.