An open letter to the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR). Here is the contact info, in case anyone would like to contact them. [email protected] Subject: Second Generation Anticoagulant Rodenticide Products, DPR Regulation No. 13-002 My Name is David Tharp, I am a field researcher for the Bay Area Puma Project and the Program Manager for the Bay Area Bobcat Study. These two projects are just underway in 2013 and one of the focus areas is determining the anticoagulant exposure levels that the puma, bobcat, and other wildlife are subjected to in the study areas around the San Francisco Bay Area region. I am deeply concerned about the unrestricted use of these indiscriminate deadly killers. Currently anyone can walk into a hardware or grocery store and purchase any number of these products and without any training or knowledge of the products capabilities, deploy them in areas where humans, pets, and wildlife can ingest them either primarily or as in a predators case secondarily. There has been extensive research that has shown high concentrations of exposure to these products in bobcat populations in the Santa Monica Mountains, 95% of the animals tested (Riley et al., 2007). Also the numbers given by the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) note that high levels of exposure to these products have been detected in non-target species and is a State wide problem, birds 96.9%, mammals 93.1% (Initial statement of reasons and public report, DPR, pg. 6, 2013). So I ask the question. Why are these deadly products still available for indiscriminate use by the general public? I am reminded of another time in our history where or society extensively used the deadly product DDT to control insects. How soon we forget. If not an all out ban on these products (my recommendation) I encourage DPR to only allow professionally trained and licensed individual’s access to these products. Thank you for your consideration on this matter.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 15:32:11 +0000
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