I was recently sent an email from Avaaz about the decline in Britain’s barn owl population – http://www.avaaz.org/save_britains_barn_owls This apparently is due to the use of rat poison on farms around the country. I signed the petition and added my thoughts in the small comment box. I thought I would share my thoughts here.
If you don’t want a plethora of rats and mice around then barn owls eat rats so we don’t need poison. We need more barn owls. Rat poison is barbaric. Not only does it kill rats but it also builds up in the system of other animals that eat the dead or dying rats. This is why it’s killing off the barn owls. The rest of the owl species are also suffering, as are other birds of prey. This cycle will continue as the poisons build up in the next in the food chain and in the soil until, ultimately, it will reach us.
This is not just a problem with rat poison but with all pesticides used in the garden and farm lands. They all should be banned. We are currently noticing a decline in garden birds – check the use of pesticides on slugs and insects that people use without thought in their garden. The dead slugs and insects are being eaten by our common garden birds – sparrows, starlings, thrushes, blackbirds, etc. Carrion birds such as magpies and crows are flourishing – they are eating the dead garden birds. In the next few years we will see a decrease in these carrion eaters as the poisons slowly build up in their systems. Poisons that cannot be digested.
These poisons are putting money in big company pockets, and they use fear tactics to get people to buy them. They frequently tell us about the diseases we can get from rats and mice. But how many diseases do we get from other humans? The number is in the hundreds and many of them are deadly. These companies have also tried to blame cats for the decline in the garden bird population. This is nonsense. Cats have always caught birds, right through the centuries. But all of a sudden they are on some kind of genocide mission?
Rats especially eat the rubbish that humans discard. They clean up after us. If we were cleaner and more concerned about our environment the rat and mice population would not be flourishing. How often do we see people throwing litter on the streets? It’s a common occurrence. If we didn’t do it we wouldn’t need the rats to clean it up. They would naturally die off. Here’s a question I like asking people – Who is the vermin? Is it the one who drops the rubbish or the one that cleans it up?
Come on people think for yourselves – birds eat the things we don’t want around. We need more birds not more poisons. Poisons should be banned.
Natural Matrix 