Rats, rodenticides and resistance: what next?
Sep 01, 2021
4 minutes
I have suspected it for a while, but confirmation popped into the inbox the other day. Four rat-tail tips that I had sent to the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) for genetic screening came back positive for second-generation anticoagulant resistance.
From here on in, the two most used rat poisons, bromadiolone and difenacoum, will be as good as useless on my shoot. If we were daft enough to use them, we would simply be risking sending the chemicals up the food chain to the likes of our barn owls, kestrels and red kites, while having no significant impact on rats.
So where do we go from here? Clearly,
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