Barn owls are being quietly poisoned across agricultural landscapes worldwide through secondary exposure to rodenticides — a preventable welfare and conservation crisis caused by rodent control practices that ignore their cascade effects through food webs.
Secondary rodenticide poisoning causes prolonged suffering. Owls that have accumulated sublethal doses experience internal bleeding that weakens them over days before death. They may be found thin, unable to fly, and confused before dying. Because barn owls are nocturnal and typically die in secluded locations, this suffering is largely invisible. The scale is significant — population-level impacts on barn owls from rodenticide poisoning have been detected in multiple countries. The tragedy is that barn owls provide the very rodent control service that rodenticides are meant to achieve — by killing the owls, rodenticide use undermines its own biological alternative. Barn owls and rodenticide use are genuinely in competition for the same ecological niche.