Government and private pest control programs using rodenticides and other poisons cause widespread non-target animal welfare harms that are often unacknowledged.
Poison-based pest control causes deaths that are slow, painful, and poorly monitored. The welfare cost is borne not only by target pests but by every animal that encounters bait stations or eats a poisoned animal. The suffering involved — days of internal bleeding for anticoagulant victims, seizures for acute toxicants — rarely figures in program cost-benefit analyses. Integrating welfare impact criteria into pest control decision-making would improve both the ethics and the ecology of these programs.