(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

By Alex Roy

A squirrel writhes in the August sun, its midsection bruised, blood seeping from its eyes. Flies circle its head; on closer inspection, its body is covered in ticks.

Long before the death of a bald eagle in Arlington, many Somerville residents recognized these symptoms as signs of poisoning by second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, or SGARs.

You may not care if a squirrel, eagle, owl, fox, or any other wildlife dies in this way, by bleeding out internally. You may not care if a poisoned rat – an intelligent mammal which some keep as pets – takes ten days to die. I care, but perhaps you don’t; that’s fine. I’d like you to consider a different question. Does killing rats and other wildlife with SGARs even help?

Rats are becoming resistant to rodenticide; meanwhile, secondary poisonings decrease the population of predators who eat them, so use of SGARs can actually increase the local rodent population. If the city is spending money on rat control, they ought to know if their measures are effective; but if they have this knowledge, it isn’t shared with the public. Somerville does not report how many rats their methods kill, how many of the rats’ predators they kill, or what they believe the city’s rat population to be, much less any useful target metrics like the amount of property damage caused by rats or the number of people sickened by ratborne diseases.

The Somerville rat control website only tells us the number of meetings they’ve held, how much literature they’ve distributed, and how many residential properties they’ve visited to tell owners to put deadly poison in the backyard. These metrics don’t tell us if poison is just the cost of keeping rats at bay, or if we’d actually be better off doing nothing. Press coverage highlights the city’s self-congratulatory promotion of equally dubious stats like the number of rat-related phone calls received or the number of rats killed specifically by SMART boxes (which don’t use poison and aren’t relevant to the question of SGAR effectiveness), but these figures aren’t published on the city’s website.

At the last ward 7 community meeting, Colin Ziegler told me rodenticide is central to the city’s rat control initiatives because it’s “cheap”. Cheap is fine, but if we’re paying anything, I’d want to know it’s effective. SGARs could be productive, neutral, or counterproductive with respect to rat population; the city spreads poison, but doesn’t contemplate this question.

For my part, I don’t think it’s right to kill any creature, nuisance or not, by making it bleed out internally over a week or more. As for the squirrel I found, I have to thank the folks at New England Wildlife Center for putting it out of its misery once they determined it couldn’t be saved. When I called Somerville’s 311 for help, they merely told me that, if I just waited for the squirrel to die, DPW would gladly come pick it up.