[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="319"] Raptors, like this barn owl, are especially vulnerable to rat poisons. Photo by Kristina Servant/Flickr[/caption]

Exterminating rats is big business in most urban areas with their steady supplies of trash and food, but the business of pest extermination has been having an alarming side effect — it’s also killing lots of non-target wildlife. Terra Verde host and Earth Island Journal [1] editor Maureen Nandini Mitra talks with Allen Fish, Director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory [2]  and Lisa Owens Viani, Director of Raptors Are the Solution [3], about how anticoagulant rat poisons are harming our wildlife and what legal efforts, including a state bill, AB 1788 [4], are underway to save our wildlife from rat poisons.

[1] http://www.earthisland.org/journal/

[2] http://www.ggro.org/

[3] https://www.raptorsarethesolution.org/

[4] http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/blood-thinning-rat-poisons-need-to-be-strictly-regulated.-a-california-bill-aims-to-do-just-that