Pest control on farms involves killing or excluding animals considered agricultural pests, raising welfare questions about the methods used and the proportionality of lethal responses.
Farm pest control creates genuine welfare conflicts: failing to control pests can harm crops and livestock, but the methods used often cause significant suffering to individual animals. The welfare solution is to prioritise non-lethal methods wherever they are effective, to use lethal methods only when proportionate, and to use the most humane lethal methods available. Rodenticide use deserves particular scrutiny because of the severe secondary poisoning effects on non-target wildlife. The precautionary approach favours integrated pest management that uses lethal control as a last resort after other methods have been genuinely tried.