by Joe Eaton
(Full article from RATS Tales June 2024)
Community activists in Massachusetts have just opened a new front in the struggle against anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs). Poisoning of wildlife in the state has reached crisis proportions, spotlighted by the death of local bald eagles and great horned owls. In response, eight wildlife rehabilitators and grassroots environmental leaders filed a petition, prepared by students at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, asking the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) to suspend the registration of all ARs—both first-generation (FGARs) and second-generation (SGARs)—pending a review of their active ingredients. A second petition requests that the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) review AR damage to wildlife protected by the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act. The petitioners and students drew from RATS’ legal and legislative experiences in California.
Accumulating data reveal the New England states as an AR poisoning hotspot, affecting birds of prey and carnivorous mammals like fishers and foxes. Ninety-six percent of the hawks and owls admitted to Tufts University’s wildlife clinic between 2012 and 2016 tested positive for ARs, as did all 43 red-tailed hawks admitted between 2017 and 2019. ARs have been found in barred owls, eastern screech-owls, barn owls, and Cooper’s hawks in Massachusetts, and are being detected with increasing frequency in snowy owls that winter in the state.
For many Massachusetts residents, the flashpoint was the AR-related deaths of two members of a family of bald eagles in Arlington, which drew extensive media coverage; three great horned owls in a local park also most likely succumbed to AR poisoning. “It hit hard,” recalls James Joyce II, a retired engineering manager who had monitored the eagles since 2015.
Wildlife rehabilitators are also seeing red foxes, fishers, coyotes, and bobcats with AR exposure and, for the foxes and coyotes, co-occurring mange which may reflect AR-compromised immune systems. Laura Kiesel, an environmental journalist who founded Save Arlington Wildlife, says she rarely saw rodenticide bait stations before 2015; now they’re ubiquitous. The proliferation appears to have been driven by a construction boom, exacerbated by local public health regulations: “Local Boards of Health need to approve new construction, and almost all of them are requiring rodent management strategies involving poison and bait stations.” She also observes that pest control operators have been aggressively marketing rat poison since the US Environmental Protection Agency removed SGARs from retail shelves in 2015. Massachusetts pest control operators reported using 540,000 pounds of ARs in 2022 alone, predominantly bromadiolone, brodifacoum, and difethialone.
Bald eagle (Photo: Dave Harper)
Kiesel and other wildlife advocates have pushed Massachusetts towns to curtail AR use. Marci Cemenska of Save Lexington Wildlife lobbied Whole Foods to remove bait boxes from its stores. Joyce helped develop an SGARs Brigade smartphone app for reporting bait boxes and poisoned wildlife. Mass Audubon launched a Rescue Raptors campaign, offering a toolkit for activists and poison-free pest control guidance.
But it was clear that more needed to be done. The legislative route appeared unproductive; Keisel says the overwhelming majority of bills never get out of committee. Putting an initiative measure on the ballot would be too expensive.
After a 2023 Zoom call with RATS Director Lisa Owens Viani exploring what had worked in California, the focus shifted to the state’s regulatory agencies. “Before that, we hadn’t had a path for litigation, didn’t know what that would look like,” Joyce recalls. Cemenska was aware that Harvard Law School had clinics that took on projects submitted by the public, and connected with the school’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic. Clinic staffers agreed to help prepare petitions to MDAR and EEA on a pro bono basis. Four wildlife rehabilitators and others joined Kiesel, Joyce and his wife Patricia, and Cemenska as petitioners.
Since its origin in 2019, the clinic has handled cases involving the welfare of farm livestock and captive animals, but more recently has ventured into wildlife issues: leghold traps, tule elk in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, manatees in Florida and Puerto Rico. “The students were excited about wildlife law issues,” recalls Clinical Instructor Rachel Mathews, who guided their work on the petitions. “When Marci approached us, it was my first time learning about rodenticides. We thought ‘Let’s see if there’s something we can do in Massachusetts.’ I had the students research California cases and Massachusetts and federal law. All the materials RATS had were so incredibly helpful to get them up to speed—a wonderful resource. It was very very useful to see the groundwork they had laid in California.”
Petitioners shared their experiences and observations with the students. Although MDAR had not consistently reported AR use, the agency happened to post 2022 data online; Joyce converted the raw statistics into a usable database. The petition to MDAR argues that the agency’s approval of ARs violates the Massachusetts Pest Control Act (MPCA): “[A]nticoagulant rodenticides do not meet the MPCA’s standard for registration because they ‘generally cause unreasonably adverse effects to the environment.’” Those “adverse effects” include the killing of non-target wildlife, notably species protected under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA) and the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The petition to EEA aims at applying leverage to MDAR. “Under MESA, all agencies are required to evaluate the impact of their actions on state-protected species,” explains Mathews. “There’s a built-in assumption that agencies are complying with that. If the EEA determines that a state action [like registering ARs] may damage state-listed species and habitat, they may notify the agency of its obligation to consult.”
The two agencies didn’t immediately respond to the petitions; the process is expected to take a while. So far, there’s been no pushback from pest control operators or politicians. Options are available if the petitions are rejected, but no specific contingency plans have been made. Whatever the outcome, the petitioners see the experience as valuable.
“I feel like something good has already come out of it,” says Cemenska. “RATS provided an inspiration and a path we could follow. We could look at their work and say ‘This is possible.’”
