Second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs) are widely used for rat and mouse control but accumulate up the food chain, silently killing predators including owls, hawks, foxes, and otters.
Rodenticide poisoning of non-target wildlife represents one of the largest scale, most overlooked animal welfare crises in suburban and agricultural environments. Because deaths occur privately — a barn owl found dead in a field, an otter carcass in a riverbank — the cumulative scale is invisible to most people. A shift toward integrated pest management (IPM), using rodenticides only as a last resort after physical exclusion and environmental management, would dramatically reduce wildlife casualties without compromising rodent control effectiveness.