Biologists are sounding the alarm: animals are dying from rat poison in the fields

Illiterate handling of poisons used against rodents in the fields leads to the poisoning of thousands of wild animals and birds. This conclusion was made by specialists of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution named after A. A.N. Severtsov, having studied the carcasses of dead hares, wild pigeons, buzzards, owls, magpies and other birds. Scientists are sounding the alarm: people may be victims of the use of poison, because poisons are transmitted through food chains.

– The problem escalates in late autumn – early winter, when the processing of winter crops from rodents begins, says Anna Shubkina, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Ecology and Evolution Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPEE RAS). She is part of a group of scientists who have been dealing with this problem for several years.

According to her, the cause of the death of thousands of animals is some types of chemicals that are scattered on the fields with winter crops against mice in the common people – “rat poison”, scientifically – rodenticides. There are a lot of their varieties. However, in the State Catalog of Pesticides and Agrochemicals Permitted for Use on the Territory of the Russian Federation, only commercial names are indicated, and not active substances, their concentrations, degrees of purification, etc. Well, how can a simple worker and even an agronomist know that in recent decades, chronically acting drugs (anticoagulants of the 2nd generation) have spread as a poison, which gradually accumulate in the organisms of living beings. In today’s market, these drugs account for 87% of all rodenticides produced. In the mass consciousness, it is generally accepted that they are not dangerous to anyone, except for malicious mice. But is it?

– The facts of the death or poisoning of animals were recorded in the Stavropol Territory, in the Volgograd, Rostov, Oryol, Kursk regions, in Krasnodar, in the Crimea, – Shubkina lists. – On the peninsula at the end of last year, more than 70 heads of the Red Book bustard were found dead in the fields, but the gray partridge, pheasant, hare, raven, magpie and owls were not even considered there. This year, Stavropol is the leader in poisonings – on the route of about 5 kilometers, local hunters found 74 hares and several foxes, – even the governor is outraged. Dead birds are probably there, but it’s hard to see them until frost beats the grass.

It was possible to establish that the cause of death of animals is rodenticides thanks to the work in which hunters, veterinarians and police officers in the Krasnodar Territory participated in 2020. They were able to collect all the carcasses of the dead animals found for 7 kilometers near the fields with the introduced poison. In total, more than 3,000 birds and animals were collected. The list of species included granivorous, birds of prey, and hares. A special study made in Krasnodar determined that they all died not from infectious and viral diseases.

To find out the true cause of their death, in IPEE them. Severtsov gathered a whole council of veterinarians and conducted a post-mortem autopsy of the dead animals.

“It turned out that some of the birds of prey actually ate poisoned mice – their stomach and intestines were affected,” Shubkina states. “However, for most, it was enough just to smell the poisoned grain scattered in the field. There was no “rat poison” in their stomachs, but the respiratory system was affected.

Further chemical analysis showed that the animals that died in Krasnodar were poisoned by 2nd generation anticoagulants. And this means that modern poison is transmitted through the food chain, which is confirmed by publications on the effects of this class of drugs around the world. Not only do they kill thousands of animals, but they end up being really dangerous for humans.

“Somehow it’s not customary for us to talk about this, but mass poisoning of people with anticoagulants has already been documented in Europe, Asia and America, and in 2019 in our country,” says the biologist. – For example, in Samara and Ulyanovsk, about 80 people were hospitalized after they ate sunflower oil from processed seeds.

Why do farmers continue to use such harmful pesticides as a poison? On the one hand, consumers believe in their relative harmlessness, because poisons are freely sold in stores. On the other hand, according to modern standards, hundreds of thousands of hectares of cultivated fields are outside the control of sanitary doctors, they are not even mentioned in state regulations. There is no control over the sale of second-generation anticoagulants, there are no medical statistics – no one keeps records of the incidence of people working with poison.

In order to avoid an even greater disaster with the population and wild animals, scientists offer urgently:

1. Create an open public information resource for real-time publication of information about planned and carried out cultivation of agricultural land with rodenticides and other agrochemical preparations.

2. To collect and monitor statistical data on all cases of poisoning with a violation of the hemostasis system of unknown etiology and maintain a unified operational statistics on the mass death of wild animals.

3. Provide information support for the sale and use of agrochemicals

4. Ensure long-term scientific studies of the effects of new drugs and their combinations, develop markers that allow determining the presence of hazardous substances without complex analyses.

All of the above is possible only with the active involvement and coordination of the work of all interested parties, including the state. Otherwise, such serious growing problems cannot be solved either at the level of subjects, or, moreover, individual agricultural producers.