Second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs) are accumulating in wildlife food chains, causing internal bleeding and slow deaths in owls, raptors and other predators.
Rodenticide poisoning of non-target wildlife represents a widespread but largely invisible welfare problem. Barn owls, red kites, buzzards, polecats, stoats and other predators all experience the same agonizing slow death from internal bleeding that SGARs cause in the target rodents. The accumulation of these poisons up the food chain means predators are most severely affected — species already under pressure from habitat loss and persecution. The suffering of individual animals poisoned in this way is significant, and the population-level effects on predator species have conservation consequences.