Dear Editor,

Our actions can have unintended consequences. Rat poison kills indiscriminately and doesn’t stop with the first death. The rat, or someone’s pet, a raccoon, bobcat, or squirrel, eats the poison, then starts dying painfully, and often runs away. Even if the poison was indoors, it’s now outside in the dying animal. Often another animal finds it, perhaps a hawk; bobcat, raccoon mom with kids, someone’s cat, or even a mountain lion, and interprets the poisoned animal as an easy meal.
In Santa CruzCounty, a mountain lion, and two bobcats were recently found poisoned. Please, try other methods that work well. Google: “How to get rid of pests without using poison,” or ask Native Animal Rescue for advice.
If you know where a rat is, perhaps try ammonia on a rag, then only after the rat is absent, block its entrances. Indoors or outdoors, remove debris, brush, branches, and garbage to make their spot inhospitable. Likely they then will move on to some other area of nature, possibly becoming a healthy snack for wildlife in our beloved ecosystem. Hawks, raccoons, opossums, bobcats, mountain lions, and skunks, are all natural predators of rats.
Too many of nature’s awesomely beautiful, and furry, sweet, creatures are sadly killed needlessly by poison if they find it, or by eating a poisoned animal. Please stop this needless death of nature.
Nick Naccari
Ben Lomond