Id personally never use poison unless absolutely necessary - i dont think its quite as unpleasant as has been posted on here (certainly in the uk, there are laws on what poisons are deemed humane and what aren't) - if you
do need to use poison, make sure you dont leave it where pets can get it, and know what the antidote for it is - pets are at low risk from eating a rodent who has died from poison (manufacturers do take into account secondary poisoning and use a formula called LD50 which works out the lethal dose required to kill 50% of the population, so if the poison leaves 50% of mice alive.... if your cat eats a dead mouse its unlikely to die - unless it eats LOADS of dead mice - hence know your antidote).
The way mice are disposed of when sticky traps are used is most commonly drowning - not at all a pleasant way to go in a fit healthy animal, secondly is a heavy blow with a blunt object (less common as its messy
).
I'd still say drowning captured mice and rats is a lot more humane than poisoning them- i agree though that if you absolutely have to use poison, it should absolutely be used as the very last resort.
Rat poison used to be a lot more humane in the past, but in recent times they have made it less lethal in the slim chance that someone tries to use it to kill someone else, the standard dose cannot kill someone days (just more likely to make the victum terribly ill, but not kill them, but at least give them hope of a chance of a stomach pump etc). The result of this is that it also takes longer to kill the rats too because its not as toxic/lethal as it used to be.
On my mums farm we don't really use poison anymore (we don't at all as far as i'm aware, but its been a while since i last brought the subject up with my mum), we used to have a really bad rat problem in the past, but it turned out it was down to certain employees being too clumsy and messy with the handling of the grain and spilling it everywhere. Since then we have sacked those employee's who carried on being messy with the grain despite warnings and everyone is a lot more vigilent about handling grain now and the rat population problem has plumeted in the years since.
On any farm in the country, there will always be rats (and mice too), but as far as farms go my mums farm is practically ratless.
However i've seen over the years how much poisoned rats suffer. I remember when i was a kid seeing numerous rats dying of poison. Once i saw a poisoned rat sitting in the corner in one of the chicken sheds, it was obviously in a bad way but i left it to wait for it to die since farm rats are vicious little animals and i didn't want to risk getting bitten or scaring it off into a hole. 4 hours later when i returned it was still there, blood coming out of its mouth, nose and bum but still alive- after 5 hrs in total, it finally died, but it was an awefully long time to suffer such a horrible way to die.
With the humane traps we used on the farm i found it better to drown the rat in a cattle trough once it was caught due to taking only minutes instead of hours like poison, but also because i really wouldn't advise taking the rat out once its captured to kill it another way like bashing its brains out or something because firstly you risk it escaping while trying to take it out, but more importantly you also risk it biting you (which it will do given half a chance if you try to handle it in any way), which could turn out to be particularly nasty considering all the nasty deseases rats and mice can potentially carry and pass onto you by biting you.
Poison also has other downfalls aside from the time it can take to kill rodents- rats will eventually become "resistant" to the poison if you use it too often. What i mean by this is that the rats, after one or two generations, will start to realise that all the rats which eat the tasty looking blue pelets don't live long. Rats soon realise that avoiding the poisoned stuff is best, and all of a sudden you end up with the problem where none of the rats are not taking the poison you are putting down for them. Many farmers thus have to rotate different types/brands of poisons so the rats continue to take them, but obviously there are only so many poisons you can go through until the rats have got used to them all.
Some people say that some farmers are beginning to get "super-rats" who are resistant to all types of poison given to them because of this...
Another problem with rat and mouse poisons is of course the environmental/wildlife problem particularly with birds of prey who scavenge on dead poisoned rats or kill them, and then end up dead or dying themselves due to the second hand poisons;
http
/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2770655.stm
http/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/5173186.stm
This probably isn't so relevant to Scoobyandy's situation, but i think while we are on the subject of poisons i think it is important to raise these concerns for anyone considering using poisons to exterminate rats or mice on their properties
.
Any ideas would be gratefully received.
. However, we then drowned the captured rats inside the cages once they were caught (doesn't sound nice, but is a far more humane form of euthanasia than poisoning them as it takes minutes instead of hours like poison).
A lot of the commercial live traps are quite small- not nessecarily somewhere tempting to go if it's obviously a dead end. Maybe the traditional hamster trap- a ramp of books of something leading to a bucket with something smelly at the bottom (on a layer of wood shavings or similar).
