Rodenticide

Rodenticides are chemicals made and sold for the purpose of killing rodents. While commonly referred to as "rat poison", rodenticides are also used to kill mice, woodchucks, chipmunks, porcupines, nutria, beavers, and voles.

Some rodenticides are lethal after one exposure while others require more than one. Rodents are disinclined to gorge on an unknown food (perhaps reflecting an adaptation to their inability to vomit), preferring to sample, wait and observe whether it makes them or other rats sick. This phenomenon of poison shyness is the rationale for poisons that kill only after multiple doses.

Besides being directly toxic to the mammals that ingest them, including dogs, cats, and humans, many rodenticides present a secondary poisoning risk to animals that hunt or scavenge the dead corpses of rats.

Anticoagulants are defined as chronic (death occurs one to two weeks after ingestion of the lethal dose, rarely sooner), single-dose (second generation) or multiple-dose (first generation) rodenticides, acting by effective blocking of the vitamin-K cycle, resulting in inability to produce essential blood-clotting factors—mainly coagulation factors II (prothrombin) and VII (proconvertin).

In addition to this specific metabolic disruption, massive toxic doses of 4-hydroxycoumarin, 4-thiochromenone and 1,3-indandione anticoagulants cause damage to tiny blood vessels (capillaries), increasing their permeability, causing internal bleeding. These effects are gradual, developing over several days. In the final phase of the intoxication, the exhausted rodent collapses due to hemorrhagic shock or severe anemia and dies. The question of whether the use of these rodenticides can be considered humane has been raised.

The main benefit of anticoagulants over other poisons is that the time taken for the poison to induce death means that the rats do not associate the damage with their feeding habits.

Phylloquinone has been suggested, and successfully used, as antidote for pets or humans accidentally or intentionally exposed to anticoagulant poisons. Some of these poisons act by inhibiting liver functions and in advanced stages of poisoning, several blood-clotting factors are absent, and the volume of circulating blood is diminished, so that a blood transfusion (optionally with the clotting factors present) can save a person who has been poisoned, an advantage over some older poisons. A unique enzyme produced by the liver enables the body to recycle vitamin K. To produce the blood clotting factors that prevent excessive bleeding, the body needs vitamin K. Anticoagulants hinder this enzyme's ability to function. Internal bleeding could start if the body's reserve of anticoagulant runs out from exposure to enough of it. Because they bind more closely to the enzyme that produces blood clotting agents, single-dose anticoagulants are more hazardous. They may also obstruct several stages of the recycling of vitamin K. Single-dose or second-generation anticoagulants can be stored in the liver because they are not quickly eliminated from the body.

Metal phosphides have been used as a means of killing rodents and are considered single-dose fast acting rodenticides (death occurs commonly within 1–3 days after single bait ingestion). A bait consisting of food and a phosphide (usually zinc phosphide) is left where the rodents can eat it. The acid in the digestive system of the rodent reacts with the phosphide to generate toxic phosphine gas. This method of vermin control has possible use in places where rodents are resistant to some of the anticoagulants, particularly for control of house and field mice; zinc phosphide baits are also cheaper than most second-generation anticoagulants, so that sometimes, in the case of large infestation by rodents, their population is initially reduced by copious amounts of zinc phosphide bait applied, and the rest of population that survived the initial fast-acting poison is then eradicated by prolonged feeding on anticoagulant bait. Inversely, the individual rodents that survived anticoagulant bait poisoning (rest population) can be eradicated by pre-baiting them with nontoxic bait for a week or two (this is important to overcome bait shyness, and to get rodents used to feeding in specific areas by specific food, especially in eradicating rats) and subsequently applying poisoned bait of the same sort as used for pre-baiting until all consumption of the bait ceases (usually within 2–4 days). These methods of alternating rodenticides with different modes of action gives actual or almost 100% eradications of the rodent population in the area, if the acceptance/palatability of baits are good (i.e., rodents feed on it readily).